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SOME RECENT 
BORZOI BOOKS 



FRIDAY NIGHTS 
Edward Gamett 

STREAKS O? LIFE 
Ethel M. Smyth 

THE RED GARDEN 
Henning Kihltr 

S0NG3 OF YOUTH 
Mary Dixon Thayer 

TERTIUM ORGANUM 
P, D. Ouspensky 

THE EIGHTEEN-NINETIES 
Bolhrook Jackson 

WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT 
fl. A/. Tomlinson 

FRONTIERS OF THE AFTER LIFE 

Edward C. Randall 



THE 



JOH^Ni, Te<^J[ie "BISHOT 



'Decordtiens by 'Btn's ^Artzybasbiff 




^hCCMXXII 



COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 

Published, September, 1922 

.0^ 



-^^^v 

^'^\<^1^'^ 



Set up. electrotvped, and printed bv the Vail-Ballou Co.. Binghamton, Jf. T. 

Paper furnished bt/ W. F. Ether iiigton d Co., New York, N. Y. 

Bound by the H. Wolff Ettate. New York. N. Y. 

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



OCT 11*22 

©C1AG86224 



The authors are indebted to the editors The 
Liberator, Vanity Fair and The Bookman for 
permission to reprint certain of the pieces in 
this book. 



Tu vero dubitabis et indignabere obire, 

Mortu2 quoi vita est prope jam vivo atque videnti? 

LUCRETIUS, III. 

Fitti nel limo, dicon : "Tristi fummo 

Nell'aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra, 
Portando dentro accidioso fummo: 

Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra." 

DANTE, INF., III. 

Where do we go from here? 

ATTRIBUTED TO THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER. 



By Mr. Bishop : Lucifer, The Fun- 
eral of Mary Magdalene, The 
Death of a Dandy, The Funeral 
of an Undertaker, The Mad- 
man's Funeral, The Death of 
God, and Resurrection. 

By Mr. Wilson: The Preface, The 
Death of the Last Centaur, The 
Funeral of a Romantic Poet, The 
Death of an Efficiency Expert, 
The Death of a Soldier, Emily in 
Hades, and the Epilogue. 



Preface ^3 

Prologue: Lucifer 25 

I. The Death of the Last Centaur 27 

IL The Funeral of St. Mary Magda- 
lene 39 

in. The Funeral of a Romantic Poet 54 

IV. The Death of a Dandy 59 

V. The Death of an Efficiency Expert 68 

VL The Funeral of an Undertaker 91 

VII. The Death of a Soldier 99 

VIII. The Madman's Funeral 123 

IX. Emily in Hades 129 

X. The Death of God 164 

XL Resurrection ^7^ 

Epilogue: Apollo 19^ 



PREFACE 

We have often been asked what determined us to 
write a book about death. It has been pointed out 
that we were very younjjj and ordinarily in the best 
of health and that everybody at our ajj;e was sup- 
posed to be bursting with life. We were fretjuently 
reminded that Sir 'f'homas Browne had been lifty- 
three when he wrote his Urn Burial and that even 
Jeremy Taylor was thirty-eight when he published 
Holy Dying. Indeed, when our purpose became 
generally known, a certain alarm was manifested, — 
for the belief in the immortality of the soul is still 
held in some quarters, so that there are still a num- 
ber of })eople who stand in the utmost terror of 
death. When we assured the world that we were 
treatinjTj the subject from a merely artistic point of 
view and that, with the best will in the world, we 
could give no guarantees of immortality, because we 
neither of us believed that any Ciod in his senses 
would be willing to provide eternal life for such 
feeble virtues as our own, we were warned that, in 
dealing thus with death, we were attempting a very 
dangerous experiment and probably jeopardizing in- 
valuable souls by a wanton act of impiety. Certain 
individuals high in the Church even wrote us 
threatening letters. 

But, on the whole, in the America of today im- 

13 



14 Preface 

mortality is a dead issue. With the preoccupation 
with material things, with prosperity and produc- 
tion, the New Jerusalem has faded. Or rather it 
has been brought to earth. For, whereas the bour- 
geoisie are comfortable and consequently do not need 
consolation for the miseries of this life in the prizes 
of the next, those members of the proletariat who 
are not eager to become bourgeois themselves have 
attempted to render life endurable, not by the Para- 
dise of the early Christians, but simply by imagining 
a future earth transformed by justice and plenty. 
In all cases, it is earth, not Heaven, that the people 
are counting on; the interest in Paradise has 
cooled greatly since the Middle Ages. 

We have therefore really been troubled very little 
by complaints at our lack of faith. It is rather the 
gloominess of our theme which has provoked the 
most objection; for, in America, the gloomier as- 
pects of life have till lately been banned from lit- 
erature. To refer to them had constituted a sin 
against our conception of ourselves, against the 
illusion that life in America leaves nothing to be 
desired. To admit the possibility of pain has 
amounted to an unpatriotic act. So that, even 
though death is a disaster as common in America as 
elsewhere, it has never been as popular a subject 
among us as it has for example in Italy. We have, in 
fact, been warned many times that we were de- 
liberately making our book unpopular and that we 
should never be able to sell it. 



Preface 15 

Why, however, in spite of this discouragement, 
we have persisted in our project to the end will, we 
hope, be more easily understood when our careers 
have been considered a little and the influences to 
which we have been subjected have been studied in 
relation to our work. 

Wc were both educated at Princeton University 
just before the United States entered the war. In 
that most carefree of all the colleges, where Apollo 
lies slumbrous and lazy, we occasionally caught 
from the lips of the god an oracle muttered in sleep 
and though we conducted ourselves in such a way 
as not to be publicly stoned by our fellows, we really 
succeeded, none the less, in breathing with a certain 
freedom. It was only after we left Princeton that 
our thoughts were turned away from life. It was 
when the old base-ball fields were transformed into 
drill-grounds, and the class-rooms where we had 
learned French and Greek were abandoned to artil- 
lery courses. It was when we both found ourselves 
in the army and were sent to France. 

But, reader, do not be alarmed! You will find 
no tales of heroism here. We were neither of us 
ever in much danger of getting killed ourselves. 
But to any one not elevated in a pulpit or barricaded 
behind an editorial desk the overpowering presence 
of death, that stood darkly in every heart, seemed 
to rob the very sun of its splendor and make the 
stars stab him like knives. No matter how rich 
men's minds had been or how full of joy and life, 



l6 Preface 

they were all turned now without release to the busi- 
ness of bringing death. The very quartermaster who 
matched suits was preparing shrouds for men to die 
in; the very worker in the hospital who patched up 
the gas and shell wounds was only getting men in 
shape to die and to inflict death. The air of the 
whole world seemed poisoned with decay; one could 
escape it nowhere; one choked in the very autumn 
clearness and the winds of spring, which were 
tainted now with the foulness of those seven million 
dead. 

All Europe reached a point at last where It could 
think of nothing but death. It could no longer be- 
muse itself with rhetoric into forgetting the reali- 
ties of the front nor ignore the collapse of six great 
nations in the unchanged routine of home. If it 
continued to Indulge in death, it would certainly die 
of its vice. For the victor, scarcely less than for 
the vanquished, there could be nothing but starva- 
tion and despair. Hungry, without heart and help- 
less, they could not even put a bold face on their 
work; they could hardly keep themselves alive any 
longer for the purpose of being killed. 

And then the war came to a close (after twenty- 
four hours' delay) and Marshal Foch entered Metz 
on the back of a white horse. But it was too late 
for people to enjoy this triumph as perhaps they 
should have done. In Its overwhelming weakness 
and exhaustion, which had stultified sorrow Itself, 
Europe could hardly raise a paean of victory or 



Preface 17 

utter a cry of relief. The people could only strike 
dully against the oppression of their own States; 
they could no longer thinlc much beyond their sacri- 
fices to the cause in which they had been made nor 
feel much more anger against an enemy as miserable 
as themselves. The newspapers were still grieving, 
to be sure, that the official killing was done, for, 
though prodigious enthusiasts for death, they were 
more interested in the slaughter at the front than in 
the slaughter of the new generation which was just 
being born at home. But people began to wonder 
whether the real conflict was the one which had 
come to an end with the white horse of Marshal 
Foch and the occupation of Metz; and the men who 
had been fighting side by side for going on five years, 
now that they found themselves at home, turned 
their machine guns on each other. 

The spring came to France like a benediction, with 
spaciousness and calm, yet from every quarter one 
heard nothing but the harsh cries of death — of 
boundary and civil war, of massacre and assassina- 
tion. It appeared that the human race was com- 
posed exclusively of enemies who were intent on 
making use of any pretext to achieve their neigh- 
bour's extinction, even at the cost of their own. One 
wondered in dismay if there were any concessions 
(even of the sacred principle of property) too great 
to be made for the purpose of balking the contagion 
of death and restoring to that agonized continent the 
freedom of life again. When the time came for us 



1 8 Preface 

to leave Europe we departed with relief — ^with the 
vision of returning to a land of prosperity and good 
feeling. 

But it was not the Statue of Liberty — for which 
the soldiers had longed — that first met our eyes as 
the symbol of the country to which we were return- 
ing: it was the black chimneys of factories that 
soiled the very summer dawn, shedding darkness 
from their upthrust arms as the Statue could never 
shed light. 

For hitherto we had seen very little of our native 
civilization. In F'rance we had thought confidently 
of America as a place where life still ran high; but in 
America we found that life itself had become a sort 
of death, and we longed for the Sorbonne hill where 
even Dante had once come and where the humanities 
still kept their freshness in the dustiest of the book- 
shops, and for the amorous evenings of May, full of 
soft and merry voices, that lie lightly over Paris. 

At home, the humanities had little chance against 
the Anti-Vice Society and the commercialism and in- 
dustrialism which had caught up the very professors 
from the great universities; and as for poor volupte, 
she had died in the blank grey streets: for New 
York was no more fitted for love than it was de- 
signed for art. Our country^vomen seemed strange 
creatures after the kind witty smiles of the French 
and at first we could hardly tell them from the men 
except by the fact that they were duller. 

No: even in the America of peace-time we looked 



Preface 19 

for life in vain. Our cries "for madder music and 
for stronger wine" met with absolutely no response, 
and we were informed that any attempt to get the 
latter would be considered a criminal offence. For 
money, it appeared, was the thing to get, not music 
nor wine. Men denied themselves music and wine, 
and everything else that makes life amiable; they 
gave themselves up to incessant labours, with aus- 
terity, with consecration. They secluded them- 
selves in bleak offices, like anchorites in cells: their 
relations with their associates became more frigid 
than those of the strictest religious order and their 
very correspondence was dictated in a bare and 
graceless style, more barbarous than the poorest 
Latin of a mediaeval monk. 

But it was not for the same reasons as the saints 
that men had renounced the colours of life. The 
great ascetics had mortified the flesh that they might 
live more intensely in the spirit. But the business 
man despised the spirit even more than he despised 
the flesh. His purpose in his barren existence of 
severity and application, in ignoring alike the ques- 
tioning mind and the flaming imagination, was sim- 
ply to make something cheap and to sell it to some- 
body dear — a pasteboard suit-case, an alfalfa cig- 
arette, a paraffin chocolate bar. And to this end he 
set thousands of his fellows to the most monotonous 
and exhausting labour — a labour which reduced 
young men and women to such a dreary stultification 
that they hardly knew how to enjoy themselves when 



20 Preface 

they came blinking from their confinement into the 
sour air of the city and the hardness of the streets — 
a labour which reduced human hands (that had 
made so many fine things) to the offices of levers and 
shafts and demanded of the human mind (which had 
spun so many myths) that it confine its entire atten- 
tion to a single mechanical act, performed again and 
again — a labour, in short, which took the manufac- 
ture of conveniences and of luxuries and of nuisances 
for the end of life itself, and compelled mankind to 
make itself miserable in the production of comfort. 

And as a result of this system we found civil war 
in America scarcely less acute than that of Europe. 
We were confronted with a colossal strike in which 
citizens were terrorised and murdered for believing 
that twelve hours a day was too long to work In a 
blast-furnace. A revolt against the intolerable life 
of the steel mills and the mines was punished with 
a repression and a blackguardism which we thought 
had been exorcised forever when the Czar's knout 
was broken. And it was not only among labourers 
that free speech and free assemblage were done 
laway with: so panic-stricken had the employers be- 
come for fear they should be made to lose money 
that they arrested citizens without warrant, de- 
ported aliens without trial and were finally able to 
revoke elections to one of the state assemblies by 
refusing to admit the representatives whom the 
people had legally chosen. 

This should, of course, have meant a vindication 



Preface 21 

by the people of their rights, but public opinion was 
dead; it was left entirely to the newspapers. The 
citizens of the Republic did not know that they had 
any rights. At a time when it was possible for a 
Socialist to be elected Prime Minister of monarchic 
Sweden, it was impossible for Socialist representa- 
tives to keep their seats In an American assembly; 
the people remained completely indifferent to a pro- 
vocation more politically vital than that which had 
thrown all Paris into turmoil at the time of the 
Dreyfus case. The Americans would let the rich 
employers do anything to them they pleased because 
they all hoped enthusiastically to become rich em- 
ployers themselves. 

Not, however, that the employers derived much 
life from the death they inflicted on others. As re- 
pressed and exhausted as their employees and driven 
by a fiercer strain, they not infrequently broke down 
when they had arrived at middle age and the 
many nerve sanitariums were full of bewildered 
millionaires who had found time at last to wonder 
where they had been going so fast. Their children, 
grown up in a world of bourgeois ideals, where the 
emphasis which their grandfathers had placed on 
religion had been shifted to respectability, learned 
no aristocratic freedom with the freedom which 
money gave them. Too often they docilely acceded 
to the office chairs of their fathers and, if they had 
latent superior qualities of imagination or intelli- 
gence, would be distracted at their desks by unin- 



22 Preface 

telligiblc longings for another manner of life of 
which they had never been told. So they carried 
on their fathers' work by upholding as their moral 
philosophy the commandments of sobriety and effi- 
ciency which they religiously taught their employees 
and to which they themselves were slaves. 

Can you wonder that we thought much of death? 
that It finally became an obsession with us? The 
city streets where we walked were as deep and as 
dark as graves; the great buildings seemed to us 
like tombs where the dead lay tier on tier. Wher- 
ever the characteristic activity of our time had 
passed, the earth appeared charred and sterile, lit- 
tered with rubbish and bones. We found our 
hymns to beauty and to love all turning into funeral 
dirges and, instead of our old witty trifles, we fell 
to writing epitaphs. In a word, our environment 
and age have at last proved too strong for us, and, 
in a spirit which we honestly hope is one of loyal 
Americanism, we have decided that we shall best 
interpret our country in a book devoted to death. 

We do not, however, for a moment, claim to be 
original In this. We know well that the plan of our 
work Is anything but novel. In the first quarter of 
the XVth century, when France seemed scarcely to 
live, impoverished, devastated and anarchic with 
confused and terrible wars, there was current a 
form of public entertainment called the Dance 
of Death. Torture and assassination and famine 
and plague, as well as the foreign and civil wars 



Preface 23 

that swept back and forth across the country, had 
made the people of the XVth century as familiar 
with death and the dead as the people of our own 
time were to become five hundred years later. But 
they dramatized the horror of their lives in a kind 
of comic morality, which was still popular as a sub- 
ject for artists as late as the great Holbein. In 
these pictures one sees a sprightly skeleton either 
dancing at the head of a procession or coming 
separately and unexpectedly to each one of his vic- 
tims in turn: he breaks the armour of the Knight, 
speeds the Ploughman on his last furrow and diverts 
the Astrologer from his globe by thrusting a skull 
under his nose; in the guise of a peasant, he fells the 
Count with his own heavy 'scutcheon and slips a 
necklace of dead men's bones about the Countess's 
neck; he breaks the Judge's staff and poisons the 
King's wine; he tears the Abbess from her convent 
and the hat from the Cardinal's head; and he finally 
carries off the Pope himself in the act of crowning 
somebody king. 

Yes: at the darkest point of the Middle Ages 
people made a farce of death. To the people of 
the XVth century death itself had more life in it than 
life has today. 



Lucifer 

I plodded homeward throiujh the snoiv and stubble, 

A wallet heavy with junk upon my back. 
And saw the sun, a fire-distended bubble. 

Sway over the stiff trees grown flat and black. 
And as the sun, perceptibly descended. 

Tumbled a cloud of carmine to the snow, 
A god came striding through the tree boles, splendid 

In pride of youth, naked, bearing a bow. 
I dropped my pack and raced across the hollow. 

Stumbled, and sank knee-deep in drifts, and cried: 
"God of the sik'cr bow, divine Apollo, 

It is not true that you with Hellas died!" 
JVith the profound tenderness of a sage or brother. 

The god turned, and tremendous thunder flamed: 
"Apollo died long ago. I am that other 

Who sang. For me the morning star was named." 



25 



The Death of the Last Centaur 

oli'o^ Koi KivravpoVy ayaKKvrov EupvTicDVO, 
aaa' ivl fieydput fityaOvfiov UetpiOoOLOy 
€s AairiOas IXOovO^ • o 8 eVet <f>pti'a>; uacrti' oli'^y 
fiaLvofieyo<: kuk' Ipt^f. Sofi-ov Kara lleLpdkxno' 
TJp<i)a<: 8 a\o<; eiAe, Suk TrpoOvpov 8e 6vpat,t 
f.\.KOV dvai^avre?, 'air' ovaTa it;Aci xoAkw 
ptm« t' a/i^o-ai'Tcs' o Se (fypimv jjiuv aaaOu^ 
rytev 7)1' urryj' o;(ewj' atan^povL Ov/xm 

Odyssey, XXI 

Tilt' Scfue is Greenwich Filiate. 

It is time lor nie to die : I h:i\'e no place 

Among you save this coKl ami fetid stall, 
Where clotted cohwebs make a dliiji;y lace 

Iu)r dusty windows and against the wall 
Hangs rotting harness from some vanished hack. 

Soon there will be no stables left at all 
In towns like this! — since now, it seems, you lack 

Not only men, but horses e\'cn, Jiere 
Where men are moved along a metal track. 

In such a world my bones will have no bier: 
You will bray my bones to tiust, to scatter tine 

Among your crops; you will sell my carcass dear 
For potted meat; you will sell these hoofs of mine — 

These hoofs that first brought fue from Pelion. 

27 



28 The Undertaker's Garland 

I shall have no burial — I, who am half divine I . . . 

Ixion was my father, Ares' son; 
My mother was a cloud ; and I was born 

In that lost world that, waking to the sun, 
By the clear light of an untarnished morn, 

Beheld in every form that moved and shone 
The candid nobleness and beauty worn 

By children and by gods. — But I, alone, 
Surviving all my kind, beheld the dawn 

Fade like a flower's freshness that, full-blown, 
Is over-blown and, with loose lips a-yawn. 

Scatters petals and rank fragrance, till, at last, 

When all the heroes and the gods were gone, 

Hearing tales of how the giant race had passed 
Beyond the sea, where, ploughing a fresh ground. 

They fashioned palaces superb and vast, 
I sailed to this new continent and found 

Great buildings and great labours, but, here, too. 
For all the monstrous bulk and terrible sound. 

No heroes and no gods. — Nay, even you 
Who would buy Beauty back at bitter cost — 

A thing your fathers' fathers never knew — 
Would lose your selves here where the streets are 
lost, 

Here where the moaning boats bring peace a 
space. 
With news of oceans you have never crossed; 

Who gape about me for an ancient grace 
Falling palely now, as from November sky 



The Death of the Last Centaur 31 

The last cold light — you arc not of my race 1 . . . 
Hear then and wonder of what race am I. 

iFrom clouds that were our kindred; 

From forests wild and wet; 
From meadows drowzy with dull gold, 

That kept the bright day yet — 
Wc came, like thunder from the hills, 

Before the sun was set. 

The summer air that slept so still, 

A tidelcss pond of gold, 
Cut past the bent bows of our breasts 

Like rapids, swift and cold; 
And shepherds, when they heard our hoofs, 

Drove in their flocks to fold. 

We leapt, with brief and brutal shouts 

0( hunt and feast and war; 
We ground the thickets low like grass 

Nor felt what flesh they tore; 
Till, wildly clamouring, we stamped 

Before the bridegroom's door. 

Our kinsmen crowded to the sill 

To welcome us inside — 
Our kinsmen, strong as we; yet men 

They were and by our side 
Their strength was dwarfed, as men who walk 

Are dwarfed by men who ride. 



32 The Undertaker's Garland 

They lifted silver basins up 
To rinse our fingers clean; 

They brought us wine in bowls of gold 
To honour their new queen — 

A wine as black as mountain pools, 
Where Hecate is seen — 

A wine that opens wide the heart; 

A rude tremendous blast 
That bids the fettered soul stand free, 

Gay, arrogant and vast — 
The prisoned master of the man 

Become true lord at last. 

Twelve bowls I drank of that great wine 

And stood a god revealed 1 
And I was Heracles, whose hand 

Had made the hydra yield — 
Who bore the monstrous carcass home 

As soldiers bear a shield! 

I watched the bride, an eager flame 

Of saffron and of red; 
I longed to crush her breasts, to bite 

Her lips until they bled; 
I laughed at such a hoofless whelp 

Lord of the bridal bed. 

I laughed and, bellowing with desire, 
With furious hoofs that spurned 



The Death of the Last Centaur 33 

Great bodies stretched in drunkenness, 

Great tables overturned, 
I plunged against the heavy air 

And snatched her where she burned. 

And roof and hills and heaven itself 

Crashed down about my ears! 
Unleashed, they slit my nose with knives; 

They ripped my side with spears; 
Their torches bit my very bone ! 

My eyes were black with tears ! 

But still I bore the bride aloft, 

Through all the blows and cries, 
Till, biting the muscles of my arms, 

Spitting blood in my eyes. 
She writhed away with sinewy limbs 

The mountains had made wise. 

But I, all blind and hacked and mad, 

Drawing now at last my sword. 
Struck out the door and charged the night, 

That like a river roared, 
Till, stumbling in a stream, I stopped, 

Stood sweating in the ford. 

Then first I knew that morning was at hand. 
For the air was clear and gray and I could see 

My bosom foul with blood and the cruel brand; 
And while I flung chill water about me, 



34 The Undertaker's Garland 

That bit my flesh more fiercely than the bride 

With those fox's teeth of hers — then suddenly 
The windows of the East were opened wide, 

Letting through the skies of day, the summer 
skies, 
Above the shadowy mountains. But I sighed 

And, turning in weariness my aching eyes 
From the blinding wind of silver Phoebus shakes 

From limbs of fire, I climbed a little rise 
To a wet green wood all strewn with silver flakes 

Of shattered light. It was quiet there. I stood 
And heard the first birds stirring in the brakes 

And thought how all my load of wine and blood 
Would be loosed by gentle sleep; and a strange awe 

Came on me, a strange awe that stilled the wood, 
As if for a god's presence and I saw 

Of a sudden, beneath a dark laurel, noble and 
grave, 
An ancient centaur, moveless as the law 

Whereto the mightiest god is but a slave, 
That not the wisest god may understand — 

Who watched me with eyes clear green like a 
summer wave 
That comes to hush its roaring on the sand 

And hard as pebbles, smoothed and smoothed 
anew. 
It laps in ebbing home — so straight and grand 

His gaze, I trembled terribly, for I knew 
That this was Cheiron, subtle Cronos' son. 

The subtlest among mortals, and gods, too. 



The Death of the Last Centaur 35 

> 

Who had reared great lords and kings, yet flattered 
inone, 

Whose tongue knew neither insolence nor fear. 
And I heard his steady voice: "Eurytion! 

What false and violent deed has brought you here 
To blink at morning?" Then, as I stood ashamed: 

"You have no need to tell me with what spear 
Your side is torn nor with what wine enflamed 

You have done us this dishonour: well I know, 
Knowing all, how — brutal, childish and untamed — 

You have wronged our hosts and kinsmen, turned 
to foe 
By the folly of a boyl And I forsee 

The hatred and the labour and the woe 
That must waste our years in conflict, till we flee 

From Pelion, lost and broken. — Ah, insane! 
Ah, wretched race, that never will be free 1 

What peace can ever win you from your pain? 
What life can ever lure you from your death? 

Twelve ages have I reared to fight and reign 
Your very heroes — teaching them the faith 

In strength and skill and honour, and to dare 
To follow even beyond the world the breath 

Of unknown seas ; and strength and skill were fair, 
But honour they forgot. — For Jason, at last 

Forgetting Colchis and the long despair. 
Forgetting that strange love that, in a blast, 

Blazed down and burnt him up, one breathless 
night 
Between two days of terror, came to cast 



36 The Undertaker's Garland 

■ — 4 

Medea and her children from his sight; 
And Achilles, when his enemy lay slain, 

Befouled and broke his limbs in savage spite — 
A better man than he. — but direr stain 

Is yet to be — for Heracles, the blind. 
Made drunk with stolen wine, became immane, 

Shall slay his master, Cheiron, from behind — 
And all my close-kept memories and all 

The calm and noble music of my mind 
Shall be lost for a jar of wine and a drunken 
brawl!" 

He ceased, and I faltered plteously, in shame: 
"You blame me justly, master, for our fall — " 

"I never blamed you! I find none to blame!" 
He cried. "It was not you who made your soul 

Seek greatness In wine nor set your flesh aflame 
For a bright-eyed woman in a saffron stole. — 

Not even myself I blame, who cannot right 
So many wrongs: It was not I who stole 

Man's godlike heart away with greed and fright! 
It was not I who made a jest of It — 

And Heracles a fool, for all his might. 
And Odysseus a knave, for all his wit! 

I did not work to drive with cruel whips 
Orestes to his crime nor, mad, admit 

One like a lover to his mother's lips 
Who, blameless, paid in anguish that poor joy I 



The Death of the Last Centaur 37 

It was not I who sped the Grecian ships 
And brought the years of darkness against Troy, 

Because a fair kind girl had been so quick 
To yield her body to an eager boy, 

When kisses had grown long! Nay, I am sick 
Of blame and blaming! I shall stand and wait 

For death to take my light by that base trick — 
In silence, under a laurel, gazing straight. 

Not wild with tears nor loud with anger now 
For that which once had burst me with their spate 

And made my boy's blood thunder at my brow : 
The rivers robbed of song; the darkened sun; 

Love balked of love and both alike brought low; 
The fading smoke of Troy her victors won ; 

The proudest honour pledged to serve a lie. . . . 
My works are all dishonoured and undone; 

I stand among ruins; naught but this have I: 
To hold, without hope or armies, my hard post 

Against Fate and the Furies, under the sky." 

Say, you who boldly of your wisest boast 

They know more than their fathers, have they 
told 
Their scholars more than Chciron knew? — at most, 
Do you heed them more than I heeded him of 
old?— 
jFor, when he had dressed my wounds and I had 
slept, 
I woke to a world of black and broken gold 



38 The Undertaker's Garland 

And, forgetting all his words, 1 rose and leapt 
Like a foal and drank the wind, the sea-sharp 
wind 

That blows from the Aegean — and I swept 
The savage hills, with nothing in my mind 

But pealing hoofs and forests black and green 
And great revenge to take and loot to find 

And lust and battle and far sights unseen! 



THE FUNERAL OF ST. MARY MAGDALENE 

A street in the poorer quarter of Jerusalem. 
Since the houses of the poor have changed but little 
in two thousand years, they need no description. 
Under the houses are shops, and the merchants of 
fruit, lentils, oil, wine, cheese and fowls stand be- 
fore the money tables prepared to bargain. Inci- 
dentally they add considerably to the stench of the 
street, which is already redolent wath the refuse of 
dead summers. 

The house in the center is noteworthy as being 
slightly more prosperous and certainly cleaner than 
the rest. The inhabitants evidently have some 
other place to throw their garbage than the street. 
The awnings at the windows are a bit frayed and 
faded it is true, but remember the former brilliance 
of their dyes. 

The people in the scene are divided into two 
groups, symbolizing, it would seem, the last judg- 
ment. On the right are the Christian folk, who 
combine the poverty of St. Francis, the filth of St. 
Anthony, and the boils of St. Simeon Stylites, while 
antedating these holy men by some centuries. 
Those on the left have either bathed recently or 
perfumed themselves — which comes to the same 

39 



40 The Undertaker's Garland 

I. ■ I 

tli'uKj. Till- mm arc nrlxuw, aloof; the ivomcn 
(jraccfiilly familiar, cither too well or too little 
dressed. In other ivords they represent respectively 
the Roman quarter and the Latin quarter of Jeru- 
salem. 

The time is early in the reign of Nero. 
SlMDN — {a Christian ivell-diyyer zuho resemhlcs an 
eagle groivn old, flabby pouches about the eyes, 
yellow at the beak) The Lord hath given and 
the Lord hath taken away. 
All riiK Ciikisiians — {ivith more than necessary 
feeling) Blessed he the name of the Lord! 
Ju.NIUS Fabullus — {a young Roman of equestrian 
family who is learning to govern the world by 
observing the routine at the procurator's of- 
fice) What is tliis Christianity anyhow? 
Calvus Vatinius RuiH) — {a flaneur at the upper 
edge of youth, of an ancient and now rich pleb- 
eian family) It's a kind of poverty cult. The 
Christians affect to despise the world. 
Fahullus — So should 1 if I lived here! 
Vatinius — Those who die in their superstition are 
to live again, in a new Jerusalem, where they 
will sit at long tables and be served pomegran- 
ates, white bread and honeyed wine to the per- 
petual playing of harps. 
Fabullus — It sounds like the summer I spent in 

Corinth. 
Vatiniits — It's (Mily those who have had nothing In 
this world who want everything in the next. 



Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 41 

Miriam — (a young Christian woman with wide 
grey eyes and large hips) What arc all these 
hussies doing here? 

Sappiiira — {a matron with large overhanging teeth 
ti>ho has espoused Christianity along with her 
husband) They are old friends of our dear 
departed sister. 

Young Ciirishan Woman — These painteil, 
frizzled — women? 'J'hey smell like the public 
baths. How did poor, dear Mary Maji^dalene 
ever come to know these queans? 

Christian Matron — She was one of them my 
dear. 

iYoung Ciiristia.n Woman — One of these 1 Tiiat 
holy woman? Why Brother Jehosophat says 
that just before she died, there was the faintest 
flicker of an aureole about her head. 

Christian Matron — Yes, he'd probably say her 
fingers were red from sewing, when they were 
stained with henna. And did you never notice 
how often she bathed? She called it keeping 
her body ready for the Lord. But it was sim- 
ply that she couldn't shake off her old habits. 

Judith — {a harlot) It's a terrible thing to diel 
To be hidden in the deep earth and never see 
the trees with fresh green on them in the spring 
or the blue skies over them in the summer. 

Chrysis — (another harlot) There's a charm for 
every kind of disease. If you could only get 
them all, you would never die. 1 have charms 



42 The Undertaker's Garland 

for twenty-seven diseases. My sailor friends 
bring them to me. I have a charm for boils 
from Aleppo and an amulet for fever from 
Messala. 

First Harlot — Did you know this Magdalene? 

Second Harlot — My first lover was a young 
Roman she had tired of. He had a scar on 
his left shoulder and used to snore. 

Simon — {half chanting) Now this body of cor- 
ruption has taken on incorruptibility. The 
carnal body has perished, but the soul is im- 
perishable. 

Calliochus — {a philosopher of Ephesus, bald- 
headed, his red heard cut in imitation of the 
busts of Socrates) The soul is triangular. 
Its three sides are feeling, perception and will. 
Had the soul been circular it would have en- 
dured forever. 

Tertullius — {a young Roman poet) Did you 
ever know this Magdalene? 

The Philosopher — I cannot say. No one, as the 
vulgar say, can escape Venus, the mother of the 
Gods. But when her fever is upon me I seek 
the ugliest slut I can find, so that afterwards 
I may have as long repose as possible. 

The Poet — You never knew her. Even without 
love she had been beautiful. She was my first 
mistress. Not all my later loves, not even 
death itself, can take her image from my eyes. 



Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 45 

The Piiilosopiikr — You're a poet, Tertulllus, and 
poetry arises from some drunkenness of the 
soul. Poetry's older than philosophy, but it's 
not so worthy. 

The Poet — But it is not only through sober reason- 
ing that wisdom comes. The poet in his imag- 
ination, the lover in his ecstasy, arrive perhaps 
at a truth beyond wise men. 

The Philosopher — So do women, but that does 
not make them the equal of philosophers. 

Christian Matron — Fd like to pull those false 
frizzles off. To come here among respectable 
people like this ! 

Young Christian Woman — And at such a time! 
They might show a little decency! 

Christian Matron — I hope no one will think they 
are friends of mine! 

Fabullus — But the effect of this Christianity on the 
populace — 

Vatinius — Is excellent! I have a slave who lays 
out my robes and sandals in the morning. He 
is now a Christian. I find he shaves me much 
better since his conversion. Fie seems better 
satisfied with his condition. He does, I believe, 
go out at dawn to sing hymns or something, but 
as I never rise before noon, I do not find it 
inconvenient. 

Fabullus — They have no rites then which inter- 
fere with the Roman Laws? 



46 The Undertaker's Garland 

Vatinius — They have only a sort of sacramental 
supper. My servant has every Thursday eve- 
ning out in order to attend it. 

First Harlot — I knew her when she was a little 
girl. We played together in the fields and 
waded in the noisy brooks. One day she came 
to mc, her two chubby hands behind her back, 
and said, "Which will you have, beauty or 
gold?" I did not know which to take and stood 
hesitating. Then she laughed and gave me 
with one hand a mite of copper, and with the 
other a wisp of plucked poppies. "There," 
she said, "you shall have both. But I don't 
want cither. I want to be loved." And she 
kissed me on the cheeks. 

Second Harlot — My dear, your hair is getting thin 
around the temples. I have the loveliest oint- 
ment to keep the hair from falling. You take 
a live bat that's been found sleeping at mid- 
night in a tomb, and crush his wing with a mix- 
ture of honey, goose-grease and the ashes of a 
dormouse. Then you heat it in a brazier and 
add a sprinkling of cinnamon, saffron, and the 
dust of last year's roses. Just try a little each 
night before going to bed. 

Simon — They that are after the flesh do mind the 
things of the flesh, but they that are after the 
spirit, the things of the spirit. They that are 
in the flesh cannot please God, but I am in the 
spirit. 



Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 47 

>^— ^—^— »————— ^-—^^■^—^—^^^— »»— ^— « 

The Poet — In the flesh beauty crumbles, fades and 
is lost, but in the mind beauty is immortal. 
Magdalene is dead; but my verses survive. 

Christian Matron — Sister Martha says that as 
soon as sister Mary was dead she rummaged 
through her things. What do you think she 
found? 

Young Christian Woman — Some relic of our 
Lord, no doubt. 

Christian Matron — Relic 1 She found a box full 
of fine ointment, and a package of spices for 
mixing with wine. 

Fabullus — My suspicions of Christianity are pure- 
ly political. Being a Roman gentleman, I en- 
tertain an open mind toward all the ideas of 
my age. But as for the Christians — they refuse 
to recognize the Roman gods. 

Vatinius — But you yourself — do not take the gods 
seriously, I hope? 

Fabullus — I am a Roman. I believe in the Rom- 
an gods, whether they exist or not. It is their 
worship which has brought us our present pros- 
perity. 

Vatinius — But what has Rome to fear from a lot 
of hungry slaves? 

Fabullus — ^AU revolutions begin in the belly and 
mount to the brain. 

Vatinius — When that happens, Christianity will 
have become a fashionable cult at Rome. Once 
let the Pontifex Maximus turn Christian, or 



48 The Undertaker's Garland 

better still, the Emperor, and all danger from 
the Christians is over. They will beome the 
chief conservers of the existing order. 

Simon — The body which was conceived in iniquity 
is dead, but through faith the just live again. 

First Harlot — There's nothing you can do for the 
dead. 

Second Harlot — I thought I was going to die 
once, but I prayed to Diana and was well in 
three days. I have a little shrine to her in my 
bed-chamber. A silversmith from Ephesus 
gave it to me. They are very generous, the 
Ephesians. I like generous men. 

First Harlot — I have brought these flowers, la- 
burnum and yellow lilies, which grow by the 
cool well-side, and roses, such as the young 
women beyond Jordan put in their hair. I think 
she would have liked my bringing these flowers. 

Second Harlot — I like flowers. They make a 
room smell fresh and cool. 

First Harlot — Do you think they'd mind if I 
went in and put them at the foot of her bed? 

Second Harlot — Who cares about these Chris- 
tians? They never bring us anything. I had 
an old Christian come up and take his son 
away from me last Friday. Right in the wine 
shop too, before all the people. 

Christian Matron — I believe one of those hus- 
sies is going into the house. 

Young Christian Woman — She's looking toward 



Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 49 

the door. A woman like that in an honest 
Christian's homel And poor sister Magda- 
lene lying there, too! 

Christian Matron — Don't speak that way about 
sister Magdalene. She's gone to her reward. 
At least I hope so, though there have been 
times I've doubted very much if the Lord had 
anything to do with the likes of her. 

Fabullus — You are dining then at Sulpicia's? 

Vatinius — No. With Publius Rufus. 

Fabullus — Until tomorrow, then. Farewell. 
{He passes down the street to the left.) 

You.ng Christian Woman — She's starting up the 
steps. 

Christian Matron — She'll get there over my 
dead body. {She runs quickly up the steps and 
stands, arms akimbo, in front of the door. 
Judith, the first harlot, stands hesitating at the 
foot of the steps.) 

Christian Matron — Take those filthy weeds away 
from herel You can't carry your abomina- 
tions into this house. 

Simon — Soft words, sister. 

Second Harlot — {walks deliberately up the steps, 
and stares into the matron's face.) You will 
call us names, will you? Take thatl {She 
gives her a shove 'which sends her sprawling 
down the steps.) And that! {Follows after 
her and kicks her.) 

Christian Matron — {scrambling to her feet) 



50 The Undertaker's Garland 

- 

You painted Babylonian I I'll show you! You 
with that dead hair frizzled on your head! 
{She grabs the curls which fall over the harlot's 
ears in her strong hands, and shakes her head 
violently hack and forth as a puppy would a 
rat, while the courtesan retorts with unaimed 
kicks at her shins.) 

The Poet — We can't let this go on I It's neither 
dignified nor sensible. 

The Philosopher — But no one expects a woman to 
be either. {Chrysis, the harlot, manages to ex- 
tricate herself from the matron's grasp, rushes 
at her headlong, and again bowls her over, 
straddles her prostrate body and attempts to 
pinion the matron's arms with one hand.) 

Simon — Though they beat the breath out of your 
body and hack you with two-edged swords, re- 
gard them not, for so did they to the prophets 
before you. 

Second Harlot — You will scratch my eyes out, 
will you? 

Christian Matron — Get off me. You're mauling 
the life out of me. {The harlot for the mo- 
ment has one arm free, which she uses with 
good effect.) 

Simon — Though they saw you with swords and com- 
mit all manner of evil unto you, rejoice and be 
exceeding glad, for great is the reward In 
heaven. {Vatinius lifts Chrysis by her 
shoulders, holds her arms as in a vice.) 



Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 51 

Vatinius — You can't do this sort of thing. You'll 
get into trouble with the police. You know 
how disastrous that would be for you. 
{The Christian regains her feet and begins 
pummelling the harlot's breast.) 

Christian Matron — I'll show you how to treat an 
honest woman I 

Simon — (steps between the two, and receives a few 
belated blows himself.) Be long suffering, sis- 
ter, patient to them that mistreat you, showing 
loving kindness to them that hate you. 

Second Harlot — (accustomed though she is to 
the vulgar indignities of the crowd, struggles 
with rage against the matron.Q Virago! 

Christian Matron — (Unable to dodge between 
the old well-digger and the harlot, thrusts her 
head forward impotently.) The slut! 

Simon — The other cheek, sister. 

Vatinus — (to Chrysis, the harlot) — You've made 
enough of a scene for one day. You'd better 
go back to the city. (Judith, unnoticed, picks 
up the flowers and sits on the steps, weeping 
softly.) 

Second Harlot — (to the matron) You fat lump I 
(Vatinius leads her away to the left.) 

Christian Matron — (toward the retreating 
pair) You painted baggage 1 You lilac-nosed, 
loose-livered, light-fingered wench 1 You 
daughter of a mangy dog! You — you — you 



52 The Undertaker's Garland 

The Poet — A peroration in 'yous'. 

The Philosopher — Could you lend me the price 
of drunkenness? I can hear the stars falling. 
{He takes several coins from the poet and fol- 
lows after the harlot.) 

Simon — {goes up the steps and listens at the door 
of the house.) Not a sound! 

Christian Matron — ^After the way I've been 
treated, you can't expect me to stay here. It 
all comes of letting such women leave their 
own quarter. 

Young Christian Woman — But Sister Mary — ? 

Christian Matron — After the way I've been 
treated! With a face like mine! {She moves 
her hand over her bleeding cheeks.) Funeral 
or no funeral — {She and Miriam go out at the 
right.) 

Simon — {comes down the steps and stands holding 
his paunch with a deprecating gesture.) The 
burial of the dead is delayed. This flesh — 
which God knows I annihilate every day — must 
have its due. Let us go and break our mid- 
day bread. {He leaves the scene, and the re- 
maining Christians follow sheepishly. There 
are now left but TertuUius, the poet, and 
Judith, the first harlot. There is a pause. 
Then he goes quietly to the steps and lifts her 
up. She is still zveeping softly.) 

Judith — You do not know how I loved her. 

Tertullius — I, too, loved her. iWe two — 



Funeral of St. Mar y Magdalene 53 

( The door opens and an aged elder appears.) 
The Elder — The peace of the Lord be upon you. 
{He descends the steps. Borne by six men, 
the bier of Mary Magdalene, who in her life 
had been beloved by the poet, the harlot and 
one other, appears in the doorway.) 
Judith — There's nothing to say now, except fare- 
well. 
Tertullius — She can but fare as the dead fare, 
which is not well. For all we have known 
and loved was nourished by the light, and 
where the dead are is no light, not even a vain 
desire for splendour stirring in the startled east 
nor diminished light of quiet stars. {The 
last procession of the Christian saint passes 
down the steps and from the scene. At 
a little distance there follows, out of all that 
had so lately been there, the poet and the 
harlot, leaning on the poet's arm.) 



THE FUNERAL OF A ROMANTIC POET 

Paris: circa 1840. 
A friend speaks: 

It should have been a day of storm and cloud 

And thunderous winds, of autumn's banners hurled 
In flaming shreds to fashion earth a shroud — 

Superb despair of some defeated world! 
It should have been the hour when evening's hand 

Her tragic mantle for the hills has brought 
And turned the trees to presences that stand 

As proud and sombre as a poet's thought! 

By some wild cairn they should have buried him, 
Where earth, upstarting, clenches stony fists; 

Where birds that swim the bleak abysses scream — 
Cry out in lonely pain among the mists 1 

A cousin speaks: 

But here the garish August sun betrays 

A vulgar earth of drowziness and dust, 
Of trees like giant weeds and turbid haze 

And roads that tarnish mourning with their rust; 

54 



The Funeral of a Romantic Poet 55 

A teeming earth, contented and immune, 

Who knows no sound of sympathy to make, 

But slumbers through the summer afternoon, 
Too gross and sluggard ever to awake. 

He lies among the common swarm she breeds, 
The gaudy wreaths that every peasant craves. 

The black and purple crosses, decked with beads, 
That make men foolish even in their graves. 

He lies with neither cypresses nor yews 

To dignify this dismallest of things: 
That one short fever should have slain his muse 

And made him fold his many-coloured 
wings. . . . 

I tell you that these poets are all mad I — 

And worse when half the world is at their heel, 

When men forget they must be fed and clad 

To» follow the vain grails their dreams reveal. 

Through all the anarchy of forty years, 

I've watched them at the wicket of my bank — 

Deceitful, stupid, impotent with fears. 

Wise only when they think to hoard a franc; 

When they were told revolt would make them free 
By rhapsodists and dreamers like our friend. 

They rose and drowned the city, like a sea. 
And left us only coins we couldn't spend; 



56 The Undertaker's Garland 

Until another dreaming lord of men 

Deceived them with another dream awhile 

And made them rob their treasuries again 

To strew their bones from Moscow to the Nile. 

Then, not content to drive their fellows mad, 

They needs must bring the Heavens to their side, 

Must hear the waves lament when they are sad. 
Must make the Pyrenees proclaim their pride; 

And there was one who would not be consoled 
But, with his heart, must hear the boulders 
break — 

Though words could never leave the winds less cold 
Nor sighing stir a ripple from the lake — 

The friend interrupts: 

♦The Lake"? The Lake forgets? While 

mortal kind 
Keep close the songs where Beauty's hand is set — 
Ah, night with words of sorrow in the wind 1 
Ah, rocks that speak! — the Lake shall not forget I 

For here a lover once wept lost delight, 
For here a lover wept that love was gone 

Who filled his arms with splendour in the night, 
Yet left him empty-handed with the dawn. 

Ah, you who, shrinking earthward, dare to mock 
The winds that sweep your counting-house away, 



The Funeral of a Romantic Poet 57 

Who labour to exclude with cunning lock 
The gods whose shadows make your door- 
step grey! 

Think you the years that rob you while they run 
Shall let your children's children, gazing back, 

Behold the tawdry graves, the blowzy sun. 
The banker cousin in his proper black? 

I know what they must see! — an empty room, 
Close-smelling, exquisite and chilling cold. 

Where taper flames are trebled through the gloom 
By mirrors wreathed with little gods of gold; 

A handsome portrait, cynically bland; 

A dainty silken fan; a broidered glove; 
Cards fallen loosely from a listless hand; 

Fine volumes that speak wittily of love. 

Then slowly the low windows cloud with light; 

The candles show for paste; there stirs about 
A little wind from gardens wet with night 

That sets them fluttering and puffs them out; 

And white-foot morning breaks her cobwebs grey 
To walk the close-walled alley-ways alone, 

To thrill with light, in gardens fresh from May, 
The very frozen goddesses of stone; 

She trolls a song that girls unwedded sing 
Who wash their linen, singing, in Lorraine; 



58 The Undertaker's Garland 

And men look out of window, wondering, 
And suddenly behold the hills again ! — 

The hills where wildness lifts the heart like wine; 

The lake thick-misted still with lovers' tears; 
Dim streams where men may drink the peace divine 

That broods in coolness by forgotten weirs. 

Like hearts that scorn the littleness of life, 
Companions to the mountains and the sea, 

Their hearts, pierced through with beauty like 
a knife, 
Cry out in tears and anger to go free ! 

A storm breaks, monstrous, blackening the air, 
In fury against Life, the base, the blind. 

Who brings the noblest passion to despair. 

Who slays the bravest swordsman from behind! 

I tell you that your summer makes too bold 
To mock men's eyes with earth's eternal 
norm — 

These only shall our children's eyes behold: 

The mountains and the morning and the storm I 



The Death of a Dandy 

Le Dandy doit aspirer a etre sublime, 
sans interruption. II doit vivre et 
dormir devant un iniroir. 

— Charles Baudelaire 

The exquisite banality of rose and ivory: 

Shadows of ivory carved into panels, stained 

And decayed in the moulding; rose-colour looped 

Casting a shadow of mauve; blown cherubs 

Bulging in silver, 

Lift six tapers to the lighted mirror. 

A dusk, deep as the under side of a rose, 
Is curtained under the old bed-dome. 
Contracting the coverlet, a shape lies 
Which may or may not be a man. 

What thoughts should an old man have 

In the London autumn 

Between dusk and darkness? 

Behind the shrunken eyelids, what apparitions? 

What pebbles rattle in a dry stream? 

A boy with a pale, lovely, dissolute face 
Sprawled on the green baize, among the cards, 

59 



6o The Undertaker's Garland 

A Spanish pistol dropped from one hand — 

Seen from the glazed squares of the club, a street 

Cobbled with faces, bundles of rags and lice, 

A yellow dwarf rising with protruding face — 

Gilded Indian gamecocks clawing blood 

Amid the clapping of pale hairless hands — 

Lady Barfinger, masked in satin, disclosing her 

gums. 
Laboured graces of a cracked coquette — 
A Jew that came on sliding haunches, 
iCrouched, and with distended palms 
Whined for his pledges — Alvanley, 
Embroidered in silver foil, poised at the Court, 
The ball a mirror of silvery Alvanleys. 

Phantoms under a cloudy ceiling, uneasy images, 

Sentences that never come to a period. 

Thoughts of an old dandy shrunk to a nightgown. 

The chamfered fall of silken rose — 

Muffling London and the autumn rain — 

Lifts and recurves, 

A beautiful young man, 

Naked, but for a superb white tiewig, 

Moves in with slow pacings of a cardinal 

Dreaming on his cane. 

The firelight blushes on the suave 
Thighs of the young man, as he glides 
From his calm with an inessential gesture 



The Death of a Dandy 6i 

To brush his tiewig. Palm upon knuckles, 

iFingers over the cane head, he regards 

Amusedly his own face in the crystal. 

"Without my powdered curled peruke 

I were but a man; so, I am a dandy. 

For what was there to do, being no god 

Burnished and strong, amorous of immortals, 

But to escape this disappointing body 

Punily erect, patched with scant hair. 

Rank in its smell too. 

By hiding it in silk and civet — adding to silver hair, 

Pomp of vermilion heels? 

What else, indeed, unless to drown 

All naked, to drown all sense in wine. 

*'They thought my wit was all in waistcoats. 

My epigrams pointed but with dainty tassels. 

When every ribbon that my fingers tied 

Protested with a fragile indolent disdain 

A world exquisitely old and dull and vain. 

So I gave them my jest — 

Walking stark naked to the gaming room 

Where the preened dandies leaned across their cards 

Their pale long fingers spread among the cards. 

They laughed: I did not laugh: so old 
So pitiful, so brutal and so dark 
The buffoonery. But the body's the jest of An- 
other — 
I make my obeisance. 



62 The Undertaker's Garland 

Young Coatsworth has become 

A naked glimmer on the lighted glass, 

Fainter than the shimmer among rainy bees. 

An old man lies propped on a bed. 
Counting the candles of the empty glass — 
An old man who has seen 
His own youth walking in the room. 

The window silk puffs with a winter gust, 

And Coatsworth, aetatis suae XXV, 

Flapped in gold braid crinkled in air-blue, 

With inscrutable precision 

Bows in a lady. 

Who repeats the scene with graces of a marionette. 

"Madam," he says, addressing her panniers, 

"Your bodice is miraculously a double moonrise, 

Your throat the traditional swan's white — 

But fuller. Your lips an exciting cochineal. 

But in truth, love Is at best 

A fashionable intrigue, an accompliced secret, 

Unendurable without grated orris root. 

Love remains to the proud mind 

A ladder loosened from the brazen tower, 

A furtive flight from the sentineled domain 

Where self is utterly contained in self. 

Though you ordered the death of a thousand roses, 

I've caught the breath of a garden, where 

No man has ever been, and the ripe fruit 



The Death of a Dandy 63 

> ■ 

Drops through the tarnished air 
Unheeded, and yew trees are made peacocks. 
I thank you for your horrible favours. 
Adieu—" 



The lady unravels to a ragged smoke : 
Coatsworth darkens with blood like a satyr, 
Blushes in a burnish on the mirror, 
Burns and is gone. 

The dry skull stretches regretful claws 

And the points of the tapers twist and bend — 

Sallow fingers of Jewish usurers. 

A rapier flicks through the curtains 
Like a needle of sunlight splintered on the sea. 
Coatsworth presses before him, 
Back to the fireplace, a panting stripling. 
A jet of wet red spurts from the shirt front; 
The youth sinks and dribbles in blood through the 
carpet. 

*'The end of such upstart heralds 

As would bar my shield to the sinister." 

The reflected visage is rigid, 

Puckered thinly with wrinkles. 

"What if I got my finger's trick, 

Whether with rapiers or a pufling neck-cloth. 

From a confectioner of Bath 

Whose fastidious years were spent 



64 The Undertaker's Garland 

Tracing on cakes sweet labyrinths of ice, 
Squeezing pink fondant into petallcd buds? 
What that, overnight, through an open window, 
He got me because a crooked pear tree 
CHmbed to the window ledge? 
No man's to call me bastard. 
And what's a murder more or less 
Amid the inane fecundity of blood and sweat. 
A barmaid and a groom repair the loss." 

The dead youth has subsided in blood 
Leaving the floor unsoiled. 

Coatsworth has leapt through the silvered glass 
Leaving its flames unspoiled. 

His pallor stained by the rose-dimmed dusk, 
An old man lies on a curtained bed, 
Whimpering like a beggar in a wet loft 
When the wind's found the cracks and the straw 
is cold. 

Coatsworth, now old, steps from the window folds 

With a gesture consciously tragic; 

Stands for a moment 

Half Don Juan, half Childe Harold; 

Then stalks, a magpie motley 

Black, buff and silver, up to the mirror. 

He regards the vain, brave fall 

Of the surtout, the triple tied neck-cloth, 

The bronze hair brushed as in busts of Nero — 



The Death of a Dandy 65 

Then with a posture almost Byronic 
Confides in silence. 



"Amid the bumpers, the scaffoldings, the ilex cones, 

I have ever worn the scorn of death 

With the careless grace of a boutonniere. 

But let me be buried with a fiery choir; 

A scarlet and lace processional of boys, 

And priests too old to lift their stiffened folds 

Too wise to hold their clouded incense as a prayer. 

Tie up my chin lest I should smile. 

And press into my hand my laurel cane 

Where Daphne with blown crinkled hair 

Feels the hard wood invade her silver thighs; 

Leave me my snuff box for its musty yawn 

And for its intricate cool ivory 

Showing an April faun at his desires; 

Probate my will, offer my house for rent. 

"I had thought to find a languor, to attain 

A gallant erudition in the snuff box and the cane ; 

To restore a tarnished splendour 

Ceremonious as a stole. 

Gorgeous like a vestment — yet urbane; 

Between the opening and the closing of the doors 

To have stood between the sconces, ripe in silk. 

Ancestral laces falling to the sword; 

Reflected In the parquetry, to dream 

Of Giorgione in a tricorn, and high wigs 

Powdered with palest silver, piled like* clouds; 



66 The Undertaker's Garland 

Of odorous mummied roses, grown dusty with a 

queen 
Tender and slight and proud. 

"But I have stood so long 
Before so many mirrors, I'm afraid, 
Afraid at last that I may be 

A shadow of masks and rapiers between the giran- 
doles 
A satin phantom, gone when the wax is down." 

He becomes a toothless grimace 

Between the moveless cherubs, silver blown. 

Under the lustered bed-dome, in the curtained dusk, 
A throat moans — the sudden and lonely 
Cry of one ridden by a nightmare, 
Who wakes and finds it is no dream. 

Old Coatsworth unravels from the bed clothes — 

As ghost unwinding its buried linen. 

And stands, toes clutched and indrawn, 

Ridiculously muffled in linen ruffles; 

Totters slowly to the glass 

To find therein, grinning wide with terror, 

The toothless mist of the last apparition. 

Shrieking, he plucks a candle from its socket 

And drives the double flame into the darkness. 

Another, another, another, 

iFour tapers extinguish their windy stains 



The Death of a Dandy 67 

In a smear of wax on the mirror. 

Another flame drops from a bony claw. 

Like the drums of a defeat, a heart sounds. 

And he peers at the dwindling face in the mirror — 

The face of a dandy brought to a shroud. 

Clutching the last tremulous candle 

The old dandy sways, 

Clings to the air, 

And sinks in a slow movement of exhausted mirth. 

The mirror is heavy with shadows 
And a white candle spreads a film on the hearth- 
stone. 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 

Edgar's grandfather had studied Latin and Greek 

And his father had studied Latin, 

But Edgar studied only Spanish, 

For commercial purposes — 

Because he had been told that it was very valuable 

In connection with South America. 

Edgar did exceedingly well at college: 
He won a ^BK 

And was active in Y. M. C. A. work. 
One day, however, a devil tempted him. 
It was as the time of a big religious revival: 
Mr. Guthrie, the well-known evangelist, 
Had }ust spent a week at the college 
And set all the more callow of the students 
To praying and repenting their sins; 
Religion spread like a rash 
Till the classes had to be suspended. 
There had been nothing like it for an orgy 
Since the club election parties. 
At the final meeting of the week, 
Mr. Guthrie made a gripping speech: 
He told the young men, with tears in his eyes, that 
there was nothing like confession 
68 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 69 

To purge away the dross of the soul and let Jesus 

into the heart 
And that they would all feel better men for it, 
If they would get up right there and confess. 
He said that the more people heard you confess, 
The more effective your confession was. 

So one freshman confessed to playing craps 

And another to having drunk a cocktail, 

And then a child-like football-playe.r. 

With a manly but unsteady voice, 

Announced that he had spent the night with a girl 

On the boat coming down from Albany, 

When he was on his way home from Northfield, 

From the big religious conference. 

There was something in the reduction 

Of this honest and enormous fellow 

To the level of a frightened child 

That affected Edgar unpleasantly, 

Though he tried to struggle against it; 

And then suddenly the devil appeared to him 

In the form of a well dressed s.fudent 

Whom he had never seen before. 

"This makes me sick!" said the- devil. 

"If the godhoppers had their way. 

They'd have us all like that." 

And he turned. and went away, 

Leaving Edgar strangely uneasy. 

He had at first intended to confess 

That he had once neglected his Physics 



70 The Undertaker's Garland 

To go to see Douglas Fairbanks, just before an ex- 
amination; 

But he didn't get around to It, sfomehow. 

He convinced himself., however, 

When the meeting was over, 

That, disgusting as these things might seem, 

They were really of a surgical cleanness. 

Because a fine clean man like Mr. Guthrie, 

With a blue suit and gold watch-chain and every- 
thing. 

Dignified them by his straight-forward manliness 

And his stern anxiety for s-avlng 

The meanest of human souls. 

But, In spite of his Interest In the Y. M. C. A., 
He did not go to China for mission work, 
After his graduation from college; 
Nor did he even go to South America, 
In spite of having studied Spanish. 
He obtained a position In a candy factory 
At Newark, New Jersey — 

A position In what was known as the Welfare De- 
partment. 
As he first approached Newark on the train, 
He was thrilled at the prospect of his work; 
When he saw the huge dark-bulking factories, 
That lay like great ships in the marsh 
And seemed to dominate the world 
With their implacable austerity, 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 71 

He exulted at the thought of Industry, 

So swollen and rapid a tide, 

Sweeping the country along to Prosperity 

On its mighty flood of Production; 

And he felt some of the outwardly grim, but in- 
wardly gay self-importance 

Of the young Second Lieutenant who has just re- 
ceived his commission, 

As he reflected that he now belonged 

To the class who were chosen to direct it — 

To speed up its processes by efficiency, 

To marshal and control its workers. 

Now, at the time when Edgar arrived to take up 

welfare work 
In the Hutchins & Blotto Hygienic Candy Kitchens, 
It happened that the whole works 
Was undergoing reorganization, 
On account of the Schlegemann-Applegate Electric 

Filler and Slicer, 
Which had just been installed there. 
Hitherto, the work of the Candy Kitchens 
Had been largely done by hand: 
One girl, for example, 
Would cut off lengths of taffy, 
While another dipped them in chocolate, 
Thus producing caramels; 

But, under the new system, practically everything 
Was accomplished by machinery: 



72 The Undertaker's Garland 

In the making of chocolate bars, for instance, 

A large vat would be filled with paraffin, 

Into which some chocolate and sugar 

Would be automatically fed, 

As well as a pint of formaldehyde 

And a bushel of almond shells; 

Then, when the ingredients in the vat 

Had been boiled for a certain length of time, 

It would be automatically tipped up 

And the contents poured into little troughs, 

Where they were hardened by a special cold-air 
process 

And finally run through a guillotine, 

Which chopped them into equal lengths and stamped 
them in enormous letters 

With the legend HUTCHINS & BLOTTO. 

This process was a great improvement 

On any ever used before; 

It more than quadrupled production. 

All the operatives had to do was to watch the ma- 
chine : 

One girl would devote herself exclusively 

To feeding the hoppers of the vat; 

She was no longer obliged to trouble 

About getting the proportions right: 

The machine did all that for her; 

Another simply watched the guillotine 

To see that it was working accurately; 

While a third checked up the finished products 

And sorted out defective ones. 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 73 

Edgar entered heart and soul, at once, 

Into the spirit of this invention 

And he assisted the efficiency expert 

In organizing the works 

So that half as many operatives as before 

Could produce four times as much candy. 

This was done by timing the fastest worker 

And making all the rest live up to him; 

Or, in some departments of the factory. 

By the institution of piece-work. 

Which, the welfare workers pointed out, 

Enabled the employees to earn more: 

Because, by this system, each one was paid for the 

individual amount of candy 
He was able to make in a day 
And was thus, as can readily be seen, 
Kept enthusiastically at it 
Pushing the work along. 

There were many other measures taken, also, 
For the welfare of the employees. 
There was a special trained nurse, for example, 
Who was sent to the homes of the workers 
Who had failed to turn up for work 
And alleged that they were sick; 
She would visit such people at once 
And, if they were really sick, 
She would go away and leave them in peace; 
And, if anybody were dying, 
With an admirable delicacy. 
She would take pains not to annoy him; 



74 The Undertaker's Garland 

But il ;inyh()tly said he was sick 
And then turned out not to be sick, 
She took such oftence at his tleceit 
And his hick of loyalty to his employer 
That she always went straight away 
And informed the company. 

But the welfare worker's chief task 

Was to promote an <'.v/>/// dc corps: 

He pubhshed a well-printed httle paper 

Devoted to the interests of the workers, 

Which came out very strongly from the first 

For loyalty to American institutions — 

And, in case some of the ignorant foreigners 

Might not understand these institutions, 

It took pains to explain quite simply 

That the chief of them was the time-clock; 

And it made it quite clear that striking 

Was a treasonable act. 

There were also jolly picnics 

In the bracing New Jersey marshes; 

They were run off according to schedule 

By the Welfare Department, 

Who furnished the picnickers with little lists 

Of the things they must not do — 

Such as wandering too far away 

Or leaving egg-shells on the grass. 

And young Edgar, as I have said, 
Entered heartily into the work: 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 75 

Just as at college he had taken up the cause 

Of the Y. M. C. A., 

And had preached the battle against vice and the 

life of service for Christ, 
So now he put an earnest enthusiasm 
Into the industrial religion 
And devoted all his spiritual force 
To the preaching, by precept and example, 
Of the following admirable commandments: 
Be sober, in order that your employer may have an 

efficient servant; 
Be thrifty, in order that your employer may not 

have to pay you higher wages; 
Be honest, in order that your employer may not lose 

money by you; 
Be industrious, in order that your employer may 

become as rich as possible; 
And, finally, be religious — 
Be optimistic and pious, 
So that, well satisfied with this life and hoping for 

a bonus in Heaven, 
You may never be tempted to complain 
Or to question economic arrangements. 

But one day another devil 

Appeared to Julgar, 

Wearing respectable ready-made clothes 

And a clean white collar, 

So that Edgar should not suspect him. 

"Would you be interested," inquired the devil. 



76 The Undertaker's Garland 

"In beholding the naked human soul, 

In examining with your own eyes its every hidden 

mystery, 
In reading its every thought as easily as you can 

read an electric sign?" 
(He spoke like an advertisement. 
Because he was a crafty devil 
And knew that this would be the surest way 
Of winning Edgar's respect.) 
But Edgar only took him for a book-agent 
And tried to shut him off; 
So the devil attacked him again with an even subtler 

cunning: 
"You must not suppose that I am mad, 
Or even a crank," he continued. 
"I can actually do what I say I can, 
By scientific methods. 
It is all Science!" 

And when Edgar heard that it was all Science, 
He went with the devil at once. 

"Let us begin with a simple type of soul," said the 

devil, 
"A type you can easily understand. 
Let us take one of the young girls 
Who works in the Candy Kitchens here" ; 
And he led Edgar casually to the operative 
Who sorted out the defective chocolate bars. 
"Put this little lens into your eye 
And then watch her back," he said. 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 77 

So Edgar did as he was told 

And fixed his eye on the girl's back 

And he found that, instead of a gingham dress, 

He was gazing at a sort of grey pool — 

Something between a tank at the aquarium 

And a picture by Mr. Arthur Davies, 

But it was greyer and more indeterminate 

Than even Mr. Davies usually Is — 

Though there were some curious dark shapes, 

Not unlike fish and sea-weed, 

Or drifting disembodied spirits. 

"Here, you see," began the devil, 

In the respectable voice of a lecturer: 

"Here, you see, we have the woman's soul: 

There Is very little colour in It: 

It is fed for ten hours a day 

By nothing but the room in which we find ourselves 

And the employment of picking out chocolate bars 

That are longer than the rest, 

Outside of that, it Is fed 

By the Newark houses and streets." 

"But surely," Edgar exclaimed, 

"This Is not the woman's whole soul! 

Does she never have any amusements? 

Has she never known a pure and selfless Love? 

And has she no Religion?" 

"That thing like a muddy purple pin-wheel," 

The devil explained politely, 

"Is her passion for the movies. 

But her chief amusement is to be seen 



78 The Undertaker's Garland 

In that dark growth at the bottom, 

Which will presently swell and burst 

And change all the grey to black; 

It is her festering hatred and anger 

Against whatever it is 

That keeps her inside this room 

For ten hours a day. 

After so many days of grey, 

Even black is a desirable colour; 

After so many chocolate bars, 

A strike amounts to a lark. 

And as for Love, you will find it 

In those foul and murky patches 

Which here thicken the grey; 

You will find its freest expression 

In the aphorisms, poems and sketches 

Which appear in such profusion 

On the walls of the women's lavatory. 

But as for Religion," he concluded, 

"You will look for it in vain." 

"Scoundrel!" cried Edgar. "Liar! 

You are defaming American womanhood! 

Tar and feathering is too easy 

For a traitor who talks like you! 

You would make me believe that our honest girls, 

As pure as any women in the world. 

Are poisoned with filthy desires and contaminated 

thoughts ! — 
And with our up-to-date Welfare Department 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 79 

Doing everything in its power 

To shield the good girls from corruption 

And save the bad ones from themselves I 

Furthermore, you are a Bolshevik, 

An alien agitator! — 

I can tell from your dark complexion. 

You are preaching organization and treason; 

You arc probably a walking delegate ! 

You want to take the free and contented employees 

And set them against their masters! 

I shall have you deported to Russia 

Or knocked on the head in the street!" 

But the devil only disappeared, 

With a harsh and metallic laugh, 

In a puff of chlorine gas. 

Edgar thought the whole incident a delusion 

Brought on by overwork; 

But the memory of it troubled him. 

He felt that a kind of spell 

Had been laid upon his eyes. 

So that nothing seemed natural to him. 

He grew to detest his office 

And the very sight of the factories 

And he avoided the eye of the employees 

When he met them around the place. 

One day as he came down to Newark 

A strange depression possessed him; 

The familiar landscape of the marshes, 

Which had formerly thrilled him so splendidly 



8o The Undertaker's Garland 

Witli its inonuincnts to licroic enterprise 

And unshakable prosperity, 

Filled hini now with an aching doubt 

And a terrible foreboding. 

He saw a country for ever tarnished with a dingy 
haze of dampness and smoke; 

The swamp-grass was bleached by the autumn to an 
almost colourless yellow, with patches still 
feebly verdant and with stagnant pools cor- 
rupted to a vivider green; 

And the whole of the vast dead meadow was strung 
with telephone wires, scarred across by muddy 
and fouiulering roads; 

The one touch o( colour and life was the series of 
huge boanl signs which atlvertised hotels and 
theatres; underclotlies, bacon aiul ketchup; 
phonographs, fountain-pens, cigarettes, ami 
safety-razors; typewriters, letter-openers, um- 
brellas and licorice drops; and, not least, the 
Toothsome Chocolate Bars of I lutchins & 
Blotto, proclaimed with the face of an enor- 
mous girl, smiling like a shark. 

Then came the world of the factories, like prodigi- 
ous and sinister war-ships; 

The excoriation of the rail-roail tracks, bristling 
with cranes; 

Low bare brick plants encased in tight bare walls 
of brick. 

Above a straight black iron river where the ripples 
looked like Haws ; 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 8i 

Yards cluttered witli metallic refuse: exact piles of 
rusty pipe; congeries of iron octopus-trunks and 
nondescript lopped-ofl tentacles. 

And there were human habitations, like a flimsier 
sort of debris : 

Feeble-lookinj^ houses, unpaintcd and grey, which, 
but for ragged lines of clothes, that (lung their 
poor reds and whites to dry in the tainted air, 
would have seemed the sea-faded wrecks of a 
faded monotonous sea ; 

And at last a broad body of water, his familiar 
Newark Bay, perfectly black and still, shiny 
and corrupt with oil, 

IWhcre the hulk of a horrible old steam-boat, as 
black as the water itself, had been slowly rot- 
ting and sinking through the stagnancy of years 
and now showed only its warped upper deck 
and its rickety blackened wheel. 

There were more factories here, jammed stillingly 
together: 

Small factories and machine-shops pressed close on 
either side, seemed to shut him in like a prison, 
crowd blankly against his view, seemed to 
sterilize his soul with their barrenness and op- 
press it with their bulk: 

Pattern-makers and clectroplaters, manufacturers of 
castings and blow-pipes, of paints and mat- 
tresses and chemicals. 

There was business going on everywhere; he knew 
how much work was being done; he recognized 



82 The Undertaker's Garland 

the prosperity represented by the cheap shops 
and solid buildings; 

But in the dirtiness of the streets, the dull colours of 
the city, the harshness of human works indif- 
ferent to cleanness and brightness, the over- 
whelming impression of life grown heavy and 
sordid and empty behind grudging dusty win- 
dows, in thousands of brick-walled rooms. 

He felt, for the first time, that Death 

Was blackening and rotting the city. 

As it had done to that wretched old steam-boat, 
which no one had thought to save. 

At the dingy brick Newark station. 

He descended in painful reflection 

And began to walk to his office 

Through hard, blank-sided streets; 

But devils pressed thick about him, 

Waylaying him as he walked. 

One came in the guise of the girl 

Of whose soul he had seen an X-ray; 

But now she froze his blood 

With green phosphorescent eyes. 

"Ah, hypocrite and fool!" she cried. 

"Will you never find yourself out? 

Will you never cease to harass and drive us 

And to tell us you are trying to benefit us? — 

To pretend that you are doing on our account 

What is really done on your account? 

Do you suppose we have ever been fooled 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 83 

Or done anything but hate you for it? 
All the gaudy words that you give us 
With your picnics and papers and nurses 
Can never deceive our muscles, 
Which you have turned into silly machines, 
Nor our racked and exhausted nerves 
Nor our offended human souls!" 

And a second devil appeared 

In the semblance of a savant. 

He looked a little like Mr. liertrand Russell, 

Whom Edgar had once heard lecture on politics, 

Having gone under the impression 

That Mr. Russell was going to speak 

On the relation of philosophy to the calculus of 

propositions. 
The figure was surrounded with a radiance 
Which filled Edgar with a strange awe: 
It was white and steady and calm and extraordi- 
narily limpid. 
And made the black street look as black 
As if he had brought Hell with him, 
And, as he spoke, it seemed to Edgar 
That he was speaking with as much detachment 
As if he were describing the causes for the decay 

of the Roman Empire. 
"The capitalist state," he began, 
As if he were reading from a book 
"Cannot last for the following reason: 
The issue involved is not really one of shorter 



84 The Undertaker's Garland 

hours and higher pay: it is a democratic issue 
similar to the one on which feudalism split at 
the end of the XVIIIth century. The em- 
ployers may carry paternalism to its furthest 
possible limit, but they will never in this way 
be able to cure the grievance which their em- 
ployees have against them; for no amount of 
welfare work or of sliding scales can ever, in- 
the long run, convince the employees that they 
are not being exploited. And from what wc 
know of humanity, we cannot expect of men 
in power that they should willingly do any- 
thing else but exploit their kind. 

The democratic claim of the workers to control the 
conditions of their work will inevitably re- 
sult in some form of industrial democracy. 
This may, of course, prove a disappointment, 
like republican democracy; but at least the 
bourgeois republic had this advantage over 
the monarchy: it meant that the people gained 
certain safeguards which they had not had be- 
fore : they were able to impeach the President 
or, at least, refuse to re-elect him, where they 
could not have rid themselves of a king by 
anything short of violence. 

We need precisely similar safeguards in the indus- 
trialism which has swallowed up the old 
Republic: the employee cannot rid himself of 
his boss by anything short of a bomb. Under 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 85 

;i system of Guild Socialism or whatever ar- 
rangement is adoptecl, it is, of course, conceiv- 
able that tlie employee iiiight he as badly fleeced 
as before, but, at least, like (he voter in the 
republic, he would think that he controlled his 
destiny and be comfortable in the assurance 
that he was represented in the management. 

For these reasons, it is evident that, unless the em- 
ployers show more foresight than they seem 
capable of doing, the struggle between capital- 
ist and worker is certain to become more and 
more acute and, as, in this country particularly, 
it is neglected by professional politics, it will 
probably end in a revolution of more or less 
violence. After all, we cannot expect the capi- 
talists to dispossess themselves; they will hang 
on to the last moment; while the liberal propa- 
ganda of people like myself will probably turn 
out to be as powerless to prevent the disaster 
as the propaganda of Voltaire and the states- 
manship of Turgot were to forestall the 
French Revolution. IVople like me will prob- 
ably, in fact, be huntetl down as reactionaries, 
as Condorcet was by the Terror. The bitter- 
ness of the oppressed may prove as cruel as 
the brutality of the oppressors. 

I am, therefore, I may say frankly, not enthusias- 
tic about the j)rospcct, but I don't know who 
is going to change it: there is a democratic is- 



86 The Undertaker's Garland 

sue at stake which makes Industrial peace im- 
possible and which renders, I may perhaps add, 
your welfare work ridiculous." 
And he disappeared in a glow, like a clear dawn 
In March. 

And as Edgar stood chilled to the bone. 

Unable to lift a foot, 

A third apparition appeared — 

A Parisian pastry-cook — 

And there shone about him the gentle air of the 

Ile-de-France. 
"I sell pastry every spring," he anrkounced, 
"At a shop on the Boulevard. 
I open a booth on the street 
So that it Is easy to buy as you pass. 
It Is impossible to keep from buying, 
Once you have beheld these cakes. 
That embody so much fancy 
And so much taste : 
The Napoleons are fragile and crisp; 
The eclairs arc filled with cool cream; 
There are cream-puffs studded with cherries and 

containing delightful surprises. 
To eat them is to love life better 
And to honour the human spirit, 
Which Is seen no less In these cakes 
Than in the panes of the Salnte-Chappelle. 
Have you created anything comparable to them? 
You have nothing but chocolate bars, 



The Death of an Efficiency Expert 87 

Which soften and j^rovv horribly soggy on the 

station stands in summer, 
Which you arc obliged to disfigure public places 

and even the freshness of your country-side 
With garish and abominable signs 
In order to sell at all! 
And yet these little cakes of mine 
Are all made with my hands 
And I can perform every phase of the process 
From the first mixing of the dough, 
Instead of knowing only one detail 
Beyond which I am helpless!" 
And he vanished like a meringue 
That seems to melt on the tongue. 

But Edgar stood long in dumbness, 

Bewildered and terrified, 

And then, at last, cried out 

In horror and in pain: 

"Oh, what have I done that my soul 

Should thus be clouded and torn? 

Why, O devils, do you torment me? 

Why do you seek to destroy me? 

All my life I have tried to behave 

Like a good American and a Christian. 

I have never spared myself 

In the accomplishment of good works. 

I have always done as well as I could 

What I believed to be most worth doing." 

And then a voice replied 



88 The Undertaker's Garland 

Which excited him, yet filled him with fear: 

"Have you ever really believed? 

Was it devils who suggested your doubts? 

They were sent to rescue your soul and not to 

destroy it — 
For they are the servants of Lucifer, 
Who has taken over Apollo's job!" 

A frenzy seized upon Edgar — 
A frenzy of knowledge and despair: 
He saw about him the walls of jails, 
Where men were being wasted and racked; 
Their hardness pressed flat on his heart; 
Their edges ground grooves in his brain — 
And over everything thickened the darkness 
That made him know he was in Hell. 

He rushed headlong towards his Plant 

In a panic to escape that prison; 

The fagade of the Candy Kitchens 

Ate him up and left no trace. 

Once within, like a dazed self-immolant at the altar 

of some savage god. 
He cast himself into the Schlegemann-Applegate 

Electric Filler and Slicer — 
Which made him into chocolate bars 
With an admirable precision. 



The Funeral of an Undertaker 



Shrunken by life to a hard grin, 
Alone upon an unkempt bed, 
The man whose labouring years had been 
A watch with death himself lay dead. 

His eyes stared at the ceiling; the chin 
Had fallen; one sleeveless arm was thrown 
Limply across the bed, the skin 
Pulled thin to fit each finger bone. 

Though all men knew that he was dead 
No waxlight burned beside his bed. 

And no one from the village came 
With black boards for a coffin frame. 

No housewife came to bind his mouth 
With a smooth strip of linen cloth. 

No prayer was said, and no one swung 
The bell rope where the church bell hung. 

II 

Year after year the villagers had watched 

91 



92 The Undertaker's Garland 

The gutters lose their evening stains, 

The skies descend and the grey dusk 

Hang cobwebs on the window panes, 

And by a yellowing street lamp seen 

A hurrying coat of blistered green 

Clutched by one hand, meagre and blotched 

With colourless spots like a bad husk, 

A shabby hat crushed low as if 

To mask the eye they had not seen — 

And pressed upon the sill and said: 

"So the old buzzard's got a whiff. 

He'll soon be pecking at the dead." 

And some of them there were that leaned 

Hard on the window panes and turned 

Sallow as though he were the fiend 

And they were souls which he had earned. 

None knew how long since he began — 

How many nights since first he held 

A dripping candle to lidless eyes 

And peering let the hot wax fall 

On lips composed for burial. 

None knew how long since he began 

To probe the dust heaps of the spirit 

And finger dusty histories; 

But slowly this washer of the dead discerned 

What droll, half-earnest clowns inherit 

The masked and tragic role of man. 

Not even the child who heard his tread 

Scuffling the autumn leaves and rain 

Could guess what unpersuadable pities 



The Funeral of an Undertaker 93 

Drove him forth to walk the rain, 

Or how this lonely washer of the dead 

Was by his own deep passion comforted, 

Until he had grown old as ancient cities 

That have looked so many times upon their slain. 

Keeping no thought of slackened blood, 
Less vigorous bone or tardy mind, 
He watched a vain and dwarfish brood 
Chatter at tasks which chance assigned. 
Seeking in toil what poets scarcely find 
Among the shadows of the immortal wood. 
And always at the one moment when 
His despised craft had power on men 
He sought with patient pitiless care, 
With visible wit, to make aware 
What puffed, unprofitable things had borne 
His bitter and compassionate scorn. 

With starved horse and bare hearse he gave 

The poor in spirit to the grave; 

And nailed the comfortably good 

In coffins of worm-eaten wood; 

He showed the niggardly and mean 

By hiding under ropes of green. 

Small gaudy flowers and bits of vine 

Their yellow coffins of cheap pine. 

With hearse and hack on polished h'ck. 

Tacky with trappings of crimped black, 

He set the opulent and loud 



94 The Undertaker's Garland 

Before the dumb, lip-fallen crowd. 

But those who'd looked in bewilderment on 

The unintelligible sun, 

Who might have leapt with a cry and bled 

Their youth out on a barricade; 

All those whose frustrate hearts had cried 

For braver beauty, and so died. 

Crumpled and dry, broken like a clod 

Too many heels have trod, — 

To these a slow processional 

Was given, — a silver drooping pall, 

Falling in sheeny folds which shifted 

Stiffly as violent horses lifted 

Black crests of thick plumes and drew 

The dim pomp to the grave. 

But few 
He found among his kith and neighbours 
Who earned such honour of his labours: 
Some nine there were and of these five 
He'd known but slightly when alive. 

So he had lived, tormented, proud 

As a poet, hated by the crowd 

That paunched and bred and plied a trade, 

Kept small accounts and sometimes prayed 

To an old god with untrimmed beard 

Who kept accounts and slily peered 

Into the things too slily done; 

Who made the moon and trimmed the sun. 



The Funeral of an Undertaker 95 

And all these when they heard him dead, 
Shrugged their bones and sniffed and said, 
"Good riddance to the village, then; 
He was a pest to honest men." 

So now he lay, a poor, untended 
Wrack of shrunk skin and jointless bone, 
The man whose endless task was ended. 
Whose anguish stifled like a groan. 

All day a small insistent clock 
Ticked and slid to the hours' mark 
And rattling to a rusty shock 
Hour by hour brought on the dark. 

And with the dark a rat came out 
And snuffed among stale bacon rinds 
And chunks of bread; a leaking spout 
Trickled; a gust flopped in the blinds. 

And in the dark the dead man sprawled 
Like one who'd stretched a bloody reign 
And in his violent hour had called 
Upon the household guards in vain. 

Ill 

The night is thin. The air is crisp, 
For the spring is scarcely felt at night. 
The air is still with a windy lisp 



96 The Undertaker's Garland 

Where the first leaves In the thicket are. 
The moon Is misty as a star, 
But the rounded stones arc washed with white 
And a chance spade glints with steely light. 

There is no sound at the graveyard's edge 
Save for the rustling hornbeam hedge; 
But something shivers beneath the soil 
As when a mole Is at his toil; 
Something struggles under the ground, 
Thrusts the earth to a gritty mound, 
Squirms and flutters, and suddenly there 
Is a frail wisp upon the air. 
Like the blue smoke of sodden leaves 
Which children burn on autumn eves; 
It writhes and gathers, shifts and breaks, 
Thickens with colour, waves and takes 
The semblance of a man long buried, 
Old before death, his gaunt cheeks serried 
With furrows where the rain has lain. 
Another mound of grave-loam stirred; 
A second gathered shape; a third. 
Then five dead men, and one dead woman, 
Cracking the ground at an unheard summon, 
Out of the shapeless air unravel. 
They glide without feet along the gravel 
Between black borders of clipped box, 
Brush through the wicket's spikes and locks, 
Glide to the church, where no one tolls 
Except for pay for dead men's souls; 



The Funeral of an Undertaker 97 

Past the church and through the streets 

Where smug wives snore between clean sheets . 

With every window shut and barred 

And a restless watchdog in the yard. 

Then at a word no lip had uttered 

Into the dead man's house they fluttered 

And there for a waiting moment stood 

Like panting things of bone and blood, 

And stared at the blind shape which there 

Cluttered the green distorted square 

The late moon in the window made. 

For these of all whom he had laid 
In the obscure and level earth, 
These only he had thought of worth. 
These alone had sought to enmesh 
Ecstasy in the unholding flesh, 
Or with stretched throats had stood 
While drums and scarlet in the blood 
Arrayed a triumph for the mind, 
When raggedness or cold assigned 
Their aching arms to swinging slops 
To pigs or storing a farmer's crops; 
And waking to the white rain 
Pecking at the shingle roof had lain 
Alone and awake, while with young breath 
Through love of life they cried for death. 
And these now from the grave were come, 
In dumb and yearning shapes were come 
To bear the dead man to his grave. 



98 The Undertaker's Garland 

Four abrupt white tapers wave 

At the four corners of the bed. 

A sudden spectral gesture moulds 

The hands to quiet, the feet to stone; 

And circling shadows compose the dead 

On a low bier of forgotten boards; 

The moonlight through the bleared panes sifted 

Falls on a pall of rigid folds 

And tassels threaded with tarnished cords. 

Then with a light of tapers lifted, 

Shuffling as if to a monotone, 

Out of the room, the narrow door — 

Nodding beneath the lintel's beam — 

The dumb, black-leaning phantoms bore 

Their burden; and, as if seen through a stream, 

Went wavering over the pavement stones, 

Rocking as if their shoulders shook 

Under the confused weight of bones. 

No shutter's chink widened to look 

With a quickened eye where in the drowned 

Colour and glimmer of thin moonshine 

The corpse-bearers shuddered without sound. 

No window gaped for the watchdog's whine 

As with its load the processional 

Flickered by silent door and wall, 

House by house, to the street's verge, 

Where from a shadow against a light 

Tt dwindled to shadow and merged 

Into the phantasmal night. 



The Death of a Soldier 

Henry had a magnificent thrill at the Havre rest- 
camp. The dirty chicken-wire bunks of the French 
barracks were the first authentic sign he had seen 
of the squalour of the war. Everything in America 
had been adequate and new, but here the grasp had 
sHppcd; the war was gaining on them. The filthi- 
ness of these old sheds, where for three years sol- 
diers had been coming and going, gave him a ghastly 
sinking of the heart, to which lurid rumours added. 
It seemed that things were very desperate and they 
were going straight to the front; it seemed that they 
were going to be brigaded with the French. These 
wholly unfounded statements, born of the excite- 
ment of the moment, had at once been accepted as 
well-established fact and everybody was telling 
everybody else about them with a grimness not 
devoid of gusto. 

But when he went out of doors', he was exhil- 
arated by the November sunshine, which brought 
out the reds and blues and khakis of the passing 
uniforms and lent splendour even to the barracks. 
He watched the strange crowd with wonder. The 
English officers stalked along in glittering smart- 
ness; they did not regard the rest of the world and 

99 



100 The Undertaker's Garland 

hardly spoke to each other. The French poiliis 
seemed tired and untidy and ridiculousy small. 
Here and there one saw an American officer, very 
solemn and a little self-conscious of the freshness 
of his uniform. He would have thought it all 
rather gay if he had not been in the Army and 
felt always the oppression of being handled like 
a thing without will. They could do absolutely 
anything they liked with him; he had felt that in 
the barracks as he had never felt it before. They 
could tell him to go to more horrible places than 
barracks and he would have to go and stay there. 
And he was dismayed to find how much the edge 
was taken off his enjoyment by the iron unshak- 
able sense that he was not his own master. Still, 
he felt keen pride at being there. This was the 
World War ! These were the things you saw 
pictures of in the American Sunday papers! — And 
how much he had grown up since he first went to 
camp in June ! 

He had enlisted at eighteen on his graduation 
from High School. "The young men and women 
who go out into the world this spring," the Super- 
intendent had said in his Commencement address, 
"have an opportunity for glory such as no other 
class has had. It has fallen to their lot — it be- 
comes their inestimable privilege — to vindicate be- 
fore the world the fair name of America ! Nothing 
grieves me more at this moment than the fact that 
I am not young enough to bear arms myself and 



riie Death of a Soldier loi 

I envy you young men with all my heart for the 
Great Adventure that is before you." The Minis- 
ter had said in church: "Take up the sword for 
Christ! The German Antichrist — the Ambassa- 
dor of Hell — has ravished France and Belgium 
and, unless we smite it first, will hold bleeding in 
its talons our own dear land! The Hun must 
be made to drink the blood he has ruthlessly spilled ! 
He must suffer every torture and privation he has in- 
flicted on the innocent! We are fighting not only 
for Democracy but for Christianity! 'Vengeance 
is mine!' saith the Lord!" And Henry, walking 
alone in scented dusks of June, had decided that 
even his uncle's real estate business in New Bedford 
was far too flat a way to begin the world. 

The first weeks of his training had disappointed 
him a little. After the sober piety of his home, 
the life of the barracks shocked him. Not even 
when he went to High School had he heard such 
language as that; but, since that was the language of 
the Army, he would of course have to learn it and 
he had soon mastered a vocabulary that clashed 
with his innocent eyes. In a month he had learned 
all the other things, too, that are fundamental for 
a soldier: the habit of not making plans and sur- 
rendering the direction of his life; the right formula 
in morose complaining when he was given anything 
to do; how to produce the impression of working 
when he was not working, but, when he did work, 
how to work harmoniously with anybody; self-re- 



102 The Undertaker's Garland 

pression in the presence of officers and the acceptance 
of a lower valuation of himself as a Private in the 
Army than as a student at High School and the son 
of a respectable farmer; ability to enjoy and get on 
with any sort of man and inability to consider any 
woman except in one simple relation. 

Now, he felt, he was really almost a man. He 
had discovered with excitement that the taboos of 
home need not be binding. You could curse like 
a baggage-man if you wanted to, without its doing 
any harm; and the men who swore and drank most 
he found the most amusing of all: they seemed to 
have more fun In them, more imagination than the 
others, and they had had more adventures. As 
long as he had been encamped near home, to be 
sure, he had left the whores alone, but when he 
should get to France — well, everybody knew what 
France was! And you didn't take much risk be- 
cause the Government would disinfect you after- 
wards. — In the States he hadn't been able to drink 
except furtively an-d It was with a thrill of adven- 
ture and freedom that he went into the English 
Y. M. C. A. and had beer among the absurd voices 
of the English soldiers. If only he could get rid of 
that damn cold that he had caught on the ship and 
from sleeping on the ground at Southhampton, he 
would be pretty well satisfied, he thought. . . . 

That night he was horribly tired and had a sore 
throat and a headache and he tried to get to sleep 
early In the barracks; but there were a lot of people 



The Death of a Soldier 103 

»— — ^— ^— — ' 

drunk who kept yelling and singing till midnight. 
And after they had subsided, everybody began to 
cough; it was like the barking and roaring of a me- 
nagerie. "Sounds like a goddam T. B. ward!" said 
somebody. Then all the lights were suddenly turned 
on and raucous voices shouted: "All outl" It was 
an artillery company that was leaving at four in the 
morning. They swore sullen oaths like heavy 
blows. Then some one began to sing an endless ob- 
scene song, which afforded them some relief by al- 
lowing them to join in the chorus. When they had 
finally gone and the lights were out again, the No- 
vember fog leaked in through the paneless windows 
and felt for his legs through the blankets with chill 
fingers. He was thankful for the chicken-wire, any- 
way, he told himself, because, even though it was 
dirty and no warmer than sleeping on the wind, it 
was luxurious after the wet ground he had had in 
England. And at the rest-camp he had met men 
who had told him about sleeping in stables on dung- 
heaps. Well, that was what he'd soon be doing, 
too I He wondered where he would be at this time 
next week. . . . 

The next day, it was their turn to leave* at four 
in the morning. He could hardly go to' sleep for 
thinking how he would have to jump up quickly 
and get into his pack; he kept waking up and think- 
ing the Sergeant had called and when the Sergeant 
did call, it found him nervously awake. He tore 
himself out of his blankets, buttoned his breeches 



104 The Undertaker's Garland 

hurriedly and put on his blouse and coat, then 
spread out the blankets on the muddy floor where 
the men had been spitting all night. He struggled 
into his pack, fumbling in desperate haste — you 
were always afraid the command would come 
before you were ready — and, holding his rifle and 
leaning against the wall, fell into a sort of doze. 
His throat was so sore that when he swallowed it 
seemed to have a sharp knife in it. 

"All out! Fall inl" bawled the sergeant. 

They stumbled out into the night and presently 
found themselves in formation. An officer ap- 
peared and made them stand at attention, then 
disappeared and left them there. After they had 
stood at attention for fifteen minutes, the Sergeant 
gave them "At ease." — "What the hell does he 
care?" said somebody. "He* sleeps warm, with 
comforters and everything. I seen their billets yes- 
terday." At the end of an hour, the officer reap- 
peared and gave them the command to march. 

When they had left the camp, they found them- 
selves confronted with a blank darkness thickened 
by the fog. Only here and there, as they proceeded, 
was the road illumined by a ghastly greenish light 
from a feeble street-lamp with a blackened top. 

At last, they arrived at a railway track where a 
pygmy unlighted train was puffing under its breath. 
When they had stood there half an hour, they were 
ordered to get into the box-cars. The Captain, made 
a little self-conscious by knowing the command 



The Death of a Soldier 105 

K i 

would be a shock, delivered it with extra harshness. 
They clambered up in deadly silence. Then some 
one had the courage to begin cursing: "Just like a 
lotta goddam cows!" he muttered and the car was 
filled with bitter growls. 

They found by falling over them that there were 
four benches in the car, two at each end and parallel 
with the sides, leaving a clear space in the middle 
from one side-door to the other. They threw down 
their packs' in a heap in this central space and ranged 
themselves on- the benches, which proved to be so 
narrow that they could neither sit nor lie on them 
without a constant effort of bracing. Everybody 
felt angry and ill and they began to quarrel among 
themselves. Some one had made out and explained 
the sign on the outside: "Hommes 40 Chevaux 
(en long) 8." It was the final wound to self-respect, 
the last indignity of the Army, which, although the 
fact was plain enough, had never before confessed 
that it put American soldiers on a level with animals ! 
A universal complaint arose. "Aw, this ain't 
nothin' !" said a voice. "Wait till yuh get to the 
trenches. Then you'll wish you could set down in a 
box-car, what / mean!" 

The train waited there* till dawn, shifting back- 
ward and forward now and then, with much bump- 
ing and creaking. Everybody cursed the French 
railroads: "Hell, they ain't got no real railroads 
in this goddam country!'* Then they seemed to be 
starting and got as far as a station, but only to back 



io6 The Undertaker's Garland 

up again and wait for another hour. At last the 
train seemed to pull itself together and set out half- 
heartedly, as if willing at any moment to abandon 
the struggle. France revealed itself as a grey and 
desolate country where everything was either marsh 
or mud. The towns were all miserable-looking and 
exactly alike: dull red roofs and yellow walls with 
washed-out streets between. The country consisted 
mostly of barren fields and dismal woods, inhabited 
by unfamiliar birds, and there were endless lines of 
poplar skeletons in whose fishbone-like branches the 
mistletoe clumps were lodged like enormous nests. 
And everything was wet, saturated with fog and 
rain. The men themselves were wet. It had been 
at least a week since they had been really dry. — So 
this was Europe I 

As the morning wore on they began to get hungry, 
but the supplies were in the last car and they had 
not been provided with emergency rations. When 
the train would falter to a stop in the midst of some 
rain-soaked wilderness the whole company would yell 
for food^ — "When do we EAT?" — but no food ever 
came. 

"Say, you're sick, aincha?" said a man next to 
Henry. "You better lay down." 

"There ain't any place," he answered; the central 
space was already full. 

"Why didun yuh go to Sick-Call at Hayver?" 
"I did, but he only gave me a CC pill." 
"Goddam ol' horse-doctor! These here Army 



The Death of a Soldier 107 

doctors dono nothin'. Here, you better take the 
corner seat so's you can lay up against the wall." 

Henry changed places with him and was very 
grateful for the corner. He tried to relax as much 
as he could without slipping off the seat. He shut 
his eyes and tried to forget the acute oppression of 
his headache and the inescapable cold in his legs. 
The jouncing of the train was like crockery broken 
on his head; the oaths and coarse words, senselessly, 
endlessly repeated, like something less than human 
speech, pounded dully against his brain like the 
regular blows of a hammer. He took refuge in- 
finitely far inside him, putting himself back home. 

The images were diminished in size and concen- 
trated in intensity, like something sharply focussed 
through a telescope; the wood-fire in the sitting- 
room gave him sharp satisfaction; the pitcher of 
water in the dining-room was too delicious to be 
believed — he felt that he could drink it with 
fierce passion. He put himself in bed on a Sunday 
morning under warm blankets and a "goose-chase" 
quilt; the gay patches of the quilt had a familiar se- 
curity; he could remember that when he was little he 
had thought of them as alive. The square-paned 
window was up and he could see the great smooth 
contours of the hill-side gleaming with snow, the ho- 
rizon as clear and bare as the room in which he had 
slept. In a minute or two his mother would come 
and call him curtly; then he would have to get up 
and dress right away; because no extra allowances 



io8 The Undertaker's Garland 

were made for Sunday morning breakfast. He 
would dread setting his bare feet on the cold uncar- 
peted floor and would lie staring at the flowered 
wash-stand set and the signing of the Declaration in 
a splotched print above it. But oh! how warm it 
was with your feet and legs in bed! . . . Presently 
he fell asleep, but only to jerk himself into wakeful- 
ness when he began to lose his purchase on the seat. 

They stopped at a red-tile-roofed station late in 
the afternoon and everybody was allowed to get out. 
Having had no food for twenty-four hours, they 
fell upon the buffet and cleaned it up. Everybody 
got wine, which, tart and clear, brought deliciously 
to the bewildered men their first real taste of the 
country. Everybody was laughing and joking; a 
faint sun had appeared. One of the young Lieu- 
tenants offered to supply anybody who needed it 
with money to buy wine and had dispensed a great 
quantity of francs when the Commanding Ofiicer, a 
conscientious Regular Army man who was zealous to 
forestall "unsoldierly conduct," put a brusque stop 
to the charity by ordering that no more wine should 
be bought. 

When the train jolted on again, morale had enor- 
mously risen. With the wine aboard it became pos- 
sible to enjoy the thing as a lark. If the French 
built toy railroads that "didn't go no faster'n a 
horse an' buggy," was that any reason why they 
should forget that they were the American Expedi- 
tionary Force, come over to kill the Kaiser? — 



The Death of a Soldier 109 

Everybody fell over Henry, who had taken the time 
when the car was empty to construct a bed of packs; 
but the wine made him feel better and he minded 
things less. 

"Shut that goddam door ! It's cold !" 

"Aw, get away from it if yuh don't like it. We 
wanta see the world! 'Join the Army and See the 
World!' Christ, I could see more than this on the 
old Pontiac trolley-line!" 

"Jesus Christ! I can't say much for this wine. 
Jest like a lotta goddam sour grape-juice!" 

"Why, Christ, didunja get any brandy? They 
had brandy there, too. . . . Why, you bas- 
tard! of course they had brandy! Don't try to tell 
me they didun have no brandy! Didun Dicky get 
some?" 

"Why Chur-rist! If I'da known that, I would- 
una bought all this here goddam red ink! It ain't 
no good to drink!" 

"Why, I find it very stimulating," chirped a pro- 
fessional male nurse of the Sanitary Detachment, a 
bland, bald-headed man with the voice and manners 
of a shop-girl. He had had two bottles of his own 
wine and as much as he could get of other people's 
and was now softly singing My Old Kentucky Home 
over and over to himself. 

"Say, look here ! I can't supply the whole god- 
dam company with brandy!" said the man who had 
some. 

"Who's askin' yuh tuh sply the whole goddam 



no The Undertaker's Garland 

compny with brandy? I only ast yuh fer a dropl" 
demanded one of the messmen, who was getting 
more and more quarrelsome. 

"Now, I'm all set," said the man who had just 
got the brandy. "All I want's a woman." 

"It's too goddam bad we coulduna had some 
wild -women along. That's what I come to France 
for." 

"One good old night in the Arcade, eh?" sug- 
gested a middle-aged man, who claimed to be a law- 
yer in civil life. 

"I wouldun give a good goddam fer the Arcade !" 
shouted the messman so loud that he could be heard 
abov^e the hideous rattle of the cars and the uproar 
of everybody talking at once. ("Sit down, you big 
bastard!" "Lay down and go to sleep!") 

"I tell you," continued the lawyer, "in the good 
old days when I was at Law School we used to set 
out on the front stoop and hail 'em in from the 
street. We used to ask 'em just to come in for a 
minute, but it was very seldom they ever got out 
again that night, what / mean!" 

"Say, this guy's sick," said a man near Henry. 
"Why doncha move over and lettum lay out?" 

"What did you say?" inquired the nurse. 

"Aw, Jesus Christ! how many times do yuh want 
me to say it? Get over and let this guy lay down!" 

"I can't move over any further. There's no 
more room. He oughtn't to lay right next to the 
open door, anyway! I think it's perfectly terrible I 



The Death of a Soldier iii 

The idea of letting a poor boy lay around like this 
when he's sickl" 

"Well, that night," continued the lawyer with 
unflagging zest, (Henry could not escape that per- 
sistent voice; the others could be forgotten as dull 
amorphous sounds, but this one was so distinct and 
near that it would not blur) "we had so much to 
start with that Jack he just passes out before din- 
ner's over and Flo says she's going out to look after- 
um. And that left me and Genevieve all alone. 
By and by she gets pale and pitches forward on the 
table and breaks a couple of glasses and I had just 
about time to get her to the couch when Jesus 
Christ ! I loses my own lunch right in the cracked-ice 
pail. I didn't come to till about six the next morn- 
ing and then I looks over at Genevieve and she was 
just the colour of a bum oyster. 'Well, Genevieve,' 
I says, *I guess we don't want to do anything now, 
do we?' And she rolls her eyes over at me and 
says: "No I I guess we don't 1" 

Twilight had erased the faded countryside and 
the damp autumn air had become sharp. The train 
kept slowing up and stopping as if it had lost its 
way. The open sides of the car brought the coun- 
try all too close to them; they might almost as well 
have been down among those wet thickets and those 
cold little streams. The sight-seers were finally 
prevailed upon to close the doors. But Henry did 
not feel the cold so much now and was no longer 
conscious of the delay; the only things he wanted 



112 The llntlcrtnkcr's Carlnnd 

were water ami to be able to breathe more easily. 
1 le had eiiiptieil his own canteen aiul then had chs- 
likeil to ask lor too much from his neij^hbours', but 
now he hail reacluil a point where thirst had 
o\ercome reluctance and he was willing to take all 
tiiey would ^ive him. I lis heail thumped like a 
d)iiamo \\ith a hot jionderous throbbinj}[. His 
breath came terribly hanl and hail begun to make 
a hoarse rasping sound. . . . 

There was a da //ling light in his face; he tin-ned 
his head i{) a\()id it. I'hen somebody was shaking 
iiim out ot iiis stupor. Distant voices: "What's 
the matter with yuh ? — What's the matter with 
him?" "1 think he's got a le\er, sir. If there was 
an extra place in one ol the regular cars — " 
•'What's the matter with yuh? Cantcha hear I'm 
talkin' to yuh .'^" 

"Got a cold," murmured I lenry, 

"Let me see your tongue. Say 'Ah.' Bowels all 
right ?" 

"If there was room in owe o{ the regular cars, 
sir — " the Sergeant suggested again. 

"Well, there isn't!" the Lieutenant cut him short. 
A former physician at Police I leadquarters, he had 
learned that "all two-thirds of 'em need is a good 
swift kick." 

He shook the mcssman, who was the nearest hu- 
man item in the confused mound of packs and human 
boilies and commanded him to get up. Some ol the 
men prodded him and helped him, swearing, to his 



The Death of a Soldier 113 

feet vvliilc ollicis utidid ;i hhiiikcl-roll and jriadc a 
sort (){ l)cd oil the floor. 

"Jiisl keep liirn warm," said the IJeuteiiant, when 
he liad finished scolding the messrnaii for disiespec f . 
"I'll ^ive iiuii soniclliin)'; when we j^et there." lie 
jumped down and (he traui started. 

"Aw, I het tlierc's lolsa room up there," said 
somehody. "I hey've f^ol all tlie room tliey want, 
with plusfi scuts and everything!" 

"It's different with a well ^uy, hut when a ^(uy's 
sick like that, why jesus C hrist I they mij^lit show a 
little consideralion." 

And the Serj^eant added : "I le's just as kind and 
gentle as a crocodile, that hird is I" 

"I never heard of suefi a tiling!" eorni)Iame(l the 
nurse, who had not said a word when the doctor 
was tfiere and wlio had more room now that I lenry 
Was moved. "I've had profcssicjnal experience, hut 
they won't listen to me." 

"Now, where am I j^onta lay?" roared the mess- 
man. "Sweet jesus 1 Do yuh tliink I'm ^.^jnta 
stand up all ni^dit ?" 

"You can lay alon^^ the rocjf," su^p^ested some- 
hody. 

"Well, d'ye know what ycnj can do?" hawled the 
other and told him what he cciuld do. 

".Sliut up, Striker, and }.'_o to sleep! Cantcha see 
the ^uy's sick .''" 

"Well, Jesus Christ! lie don't hafta he sick, docs 
he?" 



114 The Undertaker's Garland 

"Well, he's sick?" 

"Well, he don't hafta be sick, does he?" 

"Yes!" 

"Well, he's outa luck!" 

"Now, look here, fellows 1" began a young man, 
seizing upon the opportunity to indulge a taste for 
eloquence. "There's a man sick in this car and we 
ought to try to make it comfortable for him, just 
like what we'd do if it was ourselves that was sick. 
My opinion is that if we haven't got enough con- 
sideration to give him a place to lay down in we 
don't deserve to bear the name of American sol- 
diers — " 

"Aw, what the hell yuh talkin' about?" bellowed 
Striker. "He's got a place to lay down in, ain't he? 
If a man's sick I'll get up and give him a place to 
lay down in, but what I can't stand Is this here god- 
dam High School stuff!" 

"Shut up, yuh big bastard!" "Shut up, both of 
yuh!" "Speech! Speech!" "Give us a recita- 
tion, Shorty!" — And Shorty, already on his feet, 
gave them Barbara Frietchie, The Face Upon the 
Barroom Floor, The Cremation of Sam M'Gee, a 
series of ribald limericks and finally Crossing the 
Bar, described as "the dying words of Lord Tenny- 
son." Then they all became hilarious and sang 
Where do we go from here? and The Bastard King 
of England. And when the singing was over and 
drowziness had made them quiet, the enthusiastic 
lawyer, who had never halted his narrative, was 



The Death of a Soldier 115 

heard proceeding to a climax: "But finally 1 de- 
cided that I'd had enough of that and I thought I'd 
get me a nice girl to go with all the time. So I did 
— a waitress in Schwartz's she was — and I went 
with her regular, going kinda easy at first — I 
thought she was all right, see? — and then, goddam 
it! what did she do but hand me the prettiest little 
package I ever had In my life 1" 

The train stopped at a large station and nearly 
every one got out to warm himself by walking up 
and down and drinking the coffee and cognac which 
some genial chirping French soldiers were ladling 
out from a pail. 

"We've got a sick man in our car, sir," said the 
Sergeant to a mild little Lieutenant of the Medical 
Corps, who had asked him how they were making 
out. 

"Let me see him," suggested the Lieutenant. 

"He's pretty sick, I'm afraid," he said when he 
had examined Henry. "He oughtn't to be here at 
all. I wonder if we couldn't put him in one of those 
ambulances and have him sent to a hospital. I'll 
see what I can do." 

He found his Commanding Officer scowling at 
the smiling and unconscious French soldiers who 
were dispensing bitter coffee to the eager Americans. 
The Major had tasted the cognac and was standing 
stiffly with the cup in his hand, mute with moral 
indignation. 

In civilian life, this Lieutenant was a bacteriol- 



Ii6 The Undertaker's Garland 

ogist, who pursued his work with a high enthusiasm, 
scientific and humanitarian, and he therefore rarely 
felt at home in the company of doctors; he was a 
gentleman, besides, and had never got used to mili- 
tary manners. When the Major eyed him in si- 
lence, he began to sound apologetic, and the Major 
was not impressed. "They've all got colds," he 
said and threw out the tainted coffee in his cup with 
a gesture of contempt "Lieutenant Forbes has 
seen him. That's all that can be done." 

"It's pneumonia, I'm quite sure." 

"Well, we ought to be in tomorrow. He can be 
attended to then. I shouldn't like to let a man go 
like this unless it were absolutely necessary. I 
should like to arrive there with every man, if pos- 
sible." 

"But would you mind looking at him yourself?" 
He began to feel helpless; the Major thought him 
unmilitary. 

Just then the train tooted and began to back a 
httle. "Well, it's too late now," said the Major. 
"We must get aboard. I'll see about it at the next 
stop." 

They reached the next stop at about three in the 
morning and the Major was persuaded to look at 
Henry and send him off in an ambulance; it seemed 
that there was a Base Hospital nearby. 

"Now please be sure to drive very slowly, won't 
you?" begged the Lieutenant of the ambulance dri- 
ver; (he had never been able to give a command 



The Death of a Soldier 117 

properly.) "It may make a great deal of differ- 
ence, you know, because he's got pneumonia and the 
jolting might make him worse." 

"Yes, sir," promised the driver; but as soon as 
he got beyond the town he began winding up the 
smooth straight road like a spool of tape. It had 
been announced that the train of wounded he had 
been waiting for would not arrive till morning and 
his mind was full of the plump charms of a certain 
cafe patronne, whose husband had just left for the 
front. — The rush of the car drowned out Henry's 
no less harsh and mechanical breathing. . . . 

There was a little piece of cotton in his throat; 
he thought if he could only get that out he would be 
all right. He coughed and coughed and coughed 
but he couldn't dislodge it. He remarked on this 
fact to the Sergeant and later to his sister, who, it 
seemed, were both there. Then he found that he 
was being horribly shaken up. "This is the dam- 
nedest straw-ride I was ever on," he said. "I don't 
call this no fun. Straw-ride without any straw 1". . . 
But the train was slowing down; they would have 
to get out and march; it was eight miles to the 
camp. He must be able to put his hand on his pack 
and rifle in an instant. He supposed that he'd be 
able to get into his pack all right, though he didn't 
feel very well. That first moment when you heaved 
it up and wrenched it on to your shoulders was 
agonizingly hard, but after that no doubt he would 
find that he could get around. They would all fall 



Ii8 The Undertaker's Garland 

in and right-dress, jostling each other in the dark. 
. . . Ah, the train was going to stop. He reached 
for his rifle. Where the hell was it? "Are you 
going to stop here. Sergeant?" . . . Evidently not. 
The train was going faster again. They ought to 
get there in no time, at this rate ! . . . "We used to 
sit out on the front stoop," he said, "and hail 'em 
in from the street. And I bet very few of 'cm ever 
got out, either !" . . . Then it seemed he was in bed 
and it was harder than ever to breathe. Still, it 
was evidently morning and they would have to leave 
the barracks any minute. Could it be that he had 
overslept? "Is it time to go yet, Sergeant?" He 
got out of bed to see. "Here ! what do you want?" 
exclaimed somebody in a severe voice of alarm. 
"I want my shoes," said Henry. "Where's my 
gun? — " . . . "All right. We'll get them for you. 
Now, you just lie still and keep covered up." 
Somebody tucked him in. "Have you got a glass 
of water, please?" he inquired weakly. . . . Then 
things became more and more obscure. He was 
aware of the presence of a man, evidently his 
father. . . . No: it was the Sergeant at last, 
summoning him to go. He made a wild effort to 
get out of bed, but they held him down, and he col- 
lapsed on his back exhausted, panting faster than 
ever. . . . 

The doctor and nurse were watching him at noon. 
His breath had become as rapid as the ticking of a 



The Death of a Soldier 119 

small clock; his lids were already half-closed over 
his eyes, his unshaved cheeks dirtily livid and his 
gaping lips sticky and discoloured in an obscene in- 
human mask; his head was strained desperately 
back, as if some enemy had him by the throat. The 
panting became fainter; the clock was running down. 
His lungs were full and he was drowning. Then 
he had caught breath and struggled on again till he 
could get no further. Three times they saw him 
strain to the surface, only to go down. Henry was 
nothing but a thread of breath forcing its way 
through thickening channels. Then he was noth- 
ing. . . . 

"He put up a pretty good fight there at the last," 
remarked the doctor, noting the death in a register. 
"If this keeps up we'll have to have a special floor 
for pneumonia. — I should suggest the second floor." 
He smiled. "Then we'll have nothing but indiges- 
tion up here. Give 'em something to do down- 
stairs. — But seriously, they ought to isolate these 
cases. It begins to look like an infection." 

"I should think so," said the nurse. "And when 
you consider that the Army's hardly over here 
yet—" 

"Now, be sure all his personal belongings get to 
the right place. They've -been making a fuss about 
that lately." 

The orderly assembled in a khaki handkerchief 
all the things in the pockets of the uniform. There 



120 The Undertaker's Garland 

were a pipe, a crushed bag of tobacco, photographs 
of Henry's mother and sister, half-a-dozen obscene 
post-cards bought from a man who had been to 
Paris and a little brown leather pocket-book stained 
dark with sweat. 



The Madfnan's Funeral 

"Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe!' 

The wind was bitter as a curse 
Above the little pavement where 
The mourners waited with the hearse 
To bear the madman to his crypt; 
There was no colour in the air; 
The very trees stood lank and stripped. 

Somewhere behind the listening doors 
The living lifted up the dead. 
We heard the creaking of the floors; 
We heard their slow unheeding tread; 
Dimly we saw six shadows — then 
Six shadows stiffened into men. 

And all at once there rose a squeal 
And a startled devil leapt and slid 
Along the madman's cofiin lid, 
A runty devil white and plump 
As mushrooms by a rotten stump; 
His eyes were sharp as pins of steel. 

And swooping after swift as flame 
And dark as blood that's partly dried, 

On tilted feet a second came; 

123 



124 The Undertaker's Garland 

Who sliding from the coffin rim 

Hopped to the hearse and climbed inside, 

Pulling the other after him. 

And there behind the polished glass 
They grinned like monkeys in a cage. 
Four demons paced with studied pomp 
Down the slow steps, rump bruising rump, 
Moaning as if in feeble rage. 
And last one visaged like an ass 

Flicked his hoofs to a two-heeled trot, 
Scraping a rusty violin, 
Held between nose and hairy hand; 
He tripped behind the impious band 
And to the tune of an old gavotte 
Wheezed a low catch called "Love's a Sin." 

The crowd gave way; the living bore 
The dead man to the hearse's floor. 
The demons gaped like routed whores, 
Baying a dirge profane and loud; 
While those within sat on the corse 
And thumbed their noses at the crowd. 

Then with a shout they broke and ran 
To find them each a cushioned seat; 
One goatish, hairy and unclean 
Beside the clergyman was seen, 



The Madman's Funeral 125 

And whispering to that holy man 

Rode smirking through the village street. 

The one whose shape was like an ass 
Moved sidling to the hearse's wheel, 
And seeing where the coachman was, 
And a bare space beside him there, 
Leapt through the intervening air 
With a click of heel on horny heel. 

Amid the hearse's decent plumes 

Strange music sagged from strings and bone; 

And one whose eyes were fierce with pride 

Sought out the place I kept alone. 

I smelt the smell of opened tombs 

When he had climbed inside. 

Silk violet gloves episcopal 

Made suave the talons of his claws; 

His paunch let yellow foldings fall 

Upon the shrunken thighs; he smiled, 

Clasping a gesture of applause. 

A whip cracked out; drab hackneys filed. 

I saw the people left and right 
Stare fearfully before a sight 
So solemn, fat and atheous. 
"Alas for us!" the demon said, 
"God is a dolt to use us thus; 
Where shall we rest now he is dead? 



126 TIic Uiukitakcr's (larlaiul 

"But, ohl what sport vvc li;ul ol hiiii! 
Not s'mcc the ^rcat Kin^ Solomon 
Lost liis riti^ at the world's rlin 
Aiul all the (lemons iituler sea 
Strcteheil (heir win^s aiul soiij^ht (he sun 
1 las any known sueh jolh(y." 

Through enils o( slree(s (he eortej^e wouiul 

( )n ei(her suU- (he houses s(ooil, 

1 luiMled, uneaieil lor, skulls ol wooil, 

lUaek wnulous soeketeil with eyes. 

The ilemon's (hroa( JL^rew (hiek wi(h sound: 

"The mailman otue was odierwisc. 

"Joy was his in (he elear lijj;ht 
And in (he colours ol (he air, 
In rooms where skdiul \iolins 
Keneweil his adolescent sins; 
I-ove was his, and in his sijj;ht 
One lair woman seemetl moie lair. 

*'We crept on him vvidi swayinj^; (reatl; 
Through slec\es atul lingers u hisperinjj^, 
Sha|)ed worils so lewd and hlasphenK>us 
I lia( lo\'e became a leprous (hin^. 
We lauj^hed each nij.;ht besiile his bed 
Till (ioil's own lauj^hter answereil us. 



"Ami still we whispcreil, 'l.ove is lust, 
J'hc blue but grey, a broken tune 



The Madman's l^incral 127 

Outtops (he- inoutli of melody.' 
Wc tiiriud (lie cMitli to sliiikiiijT tlust, 
Wc climmtd (he sun ami left the moon 
A twisted penny in the sky. 

"We siuked his pores with pallid lips, 
We mirkeii the hlood within his heart, 
We drove him forth with iron whips, 
We seouri^ed him hack with bloody rods ; 
I hen drew him to a place apart 
To intimate this work was (iod's." 

Tlie carrlap;cs he^an to wind 

Into a place of mounds and stones, 

1 ledj^es of hron/e-jj;reen box and yews 

(jireen-black and clipped (o curious cones. 

"^riie fiend resumed : " lOni^ht I choose 

Another nicely fashioned mind." 

The carriage stopped. The corpse went by 

Ami sliadows in still folds of black. 

1 looked into (he demon's eye 

And saw therein, circled with fire. 

My own eyes starinp^. 1 left the hack, 

And with the fiend plashed throujj;h the mire. 

We reached the jjjrave. I looked and j)cered. 
Nor saw a devil anywhere; 
Hut straijj;ht the coachman seized a fife 
And played an old and ribald air ; 



128 The Undertaker's Garland 

And through the prayers the parson leered 
With hot eyes at the sexton's wife. 

Behind the fir tree of his aunt's 

Ungainly tomb, the grocer found 

A fiery flask; a crape veil shrieked 

And passed into a rigid trance; 

And a boy laughed. The grave ropes creaked, 

The coffin sank into the ground. 

Earth, falling stone and gritty clay 
Resounded from the coffin lid; 
Spades crunched on earth and scraped on stone; 
Earth fell; at last a low mound hid 
The place where the madman's body lay. 
The crowd dispersed. I stood alone. 

I dared not move. A sudden dread 
Was on me lest I turn my head 
And see naught but the frozen sod 
And the stiff trees which twilight blurred; 
For in my thought I shaped a word 
Cruel and meaningless as God. 



Emily in Hades 

Emily had died of influenza in the stiff and rather 
barren bed-room which no longer than a year be- 
fore she had fitted up with wedding presents. Her 
husband sat dry-eyed and dazed, aghast before the 
prospect of his future; it was not that a great pas- 
sion had united them; it was not that the contrast 
was so great between Emily lying beside him living 
and Emily lying beside him dead; but he had really 
been fond of Emily and had grown completely ac- 
customed to her, and, having worked very hard to 
support her in the bondselling business, now found 
himself at a ghastly loss as to why he should go on 
selling bonds. He had thought he had his life so 
securely arranged, with everything provided for, 
and now what he had supposed the safest of his in- 
vestments had completely failed. He ought to 
have prevented it somehow, his well-trained con- 
science told him; he had been found wanting in ef- 
ficiency. If he had only been firmer about over- 
shoes, she would never have caught that cold. 

But Emily herself only knew that she was no 
longer being smothered: the pillows had suddenly 
dissolved from her chest and the pain been snuffed 
out in her throat. She was standing in a kind of 

129 



130 The Undertaker's Garland 

I — —4 

dark mist, which she thought at first was the night. 
Yet it was not quite like the night nor even quite like 
the twilight. It was more like the hour before 
dawn when even the stars are blotted out. It was 
all so strange that she forgot to feel relief at being 
a real person again. It was like waking up from a 
fainting fit: you could hardly recognize yourself. 

When she did come to think about herself, she 
wondered if she zvere a real person. She was con- 
scious of nothing but her thoughts and of the grey 
dimness that surrounded her. She could neither 
smell nor taste the mist nor feel whether it were 
warm or cold. She must be in a dream, she thought; 
one didn't taste or feel in dreams. But her situa- 
tion seemed natural and fixed, as it never did in 
dreams. She tried to remember what had hap- 
pened to her; she had been very sick in bed (she 
could see it all objectively now) ; she had become 
more and more uncomfortable, so uncomfortable 
that she could not stand it; she had thought she 
was going to die. — Then, definitely, in a flash, she 
realized that she had died. 

But she did not at first feel distress at having left 
her husband and the world; she was filled with 
the buoyancy of freedom and thrilled with ad- 
venture like a child. So you came out all right 
on the other side and you were still you ! She 
laughed in her joy of release; she was all alive 
with expectancy. Perhaps, she thought with ex- 



Emily in Hades 131 

citcmcnt, she was at last goiii^ to listen to the 
music she had been waiting for all her life 1 

When she had grown accustomed to the (jueer 
darkness, siie saw that she was on the edge of 
something: tiiere was a great slate-grey floor in 
front of her stretching off into misty remoteness and 
along it lay a rough rock-like strip with blackish 
cracks and streaks; beyond this and behind her 
rose a thick and j)rofound darkness, like a bot- 
tom-less black sea. And then she saw that 
the strip was a beacli, a beach without sand or 
seaweed, as bare as a belt of lava. 

Scrutinizing this strange shore, she made out a 
shape like a boat that seemed to be lying beached, 
not far away on her left. She started toward it, 
noticing as she went that she could not feel the 
the ground beneath her feet. When she had come 
nearer, she found that it was a big unpainted flat- 
bottomed barge, with an oltl rnan sitting in the prow. 
As she stopped and stood in doubt a few yards 
away, he turned and regarded her without interest 
from dim and lifeless eyes, and she suddenly be- 
came aware that she had nothing on but a night- 
gown and that her hair was down her back. 

"(let in," said the old man. 

"Why?" asked I'lmily. "Where will you take 
me?" 

"Over to Hades," he replied. 

"But I'm not dressed I" she protested. 



132 The Undertaker's Garland 

"It doesn't matter," he said. 

He spoke so much as if everything were a mat- 
ter of course and seemed to take so little interest 
in the conversation that, after hesitating a mo- 
ment, she climbed into the boat, because it seemed 
to present itself as the only thing to do. And, as 
soon as she had taken her place on a plain plank 
seat in the stern, the old man came down to the 
centre, pushed the boat off from the shore, and fitting 
great clumsy oars to the locks, began to row silently 
away. As he sat facing Emily, she observed him 
as well as she could in the strange atmosphere, which 
made everything shadowy and uncertain, like things 
seen in moving pictures, or rather, she presently 
amended, like things thought and not seen — as if 
there were no real substance which the senses could 
touch or smell, but only shapes seen and heard as 
one sees and hears in one's mind. He was dressed 
in old and weatherworn clothes, as colourless as 
the barge, and bent above his monstrous oars with 
infinite weariness and indifference. The lumbering 
boat seemed scarcely to disturb the leaden surface 
of the water. 

"You say that you are taking me to Hades?" 
she at length took courage to inquire. "Isn't there 
any Heaven then?" 

"No," he answered, "There's no Heaven." 

"But what about God?" she asked. 

"God is dead," he replied. 

"But I thought that God was immortal." 



Emily in Hades 133 

"How could man, who lives so short a time, hope 
to make a God who would be deathless?" 

It seemed to her that he answered her questions 
as part of a monotonous routine. Everybody who 
came, she supposed, must ply him with the same 
questions. And the thought of the innumerable 
millions of souls whom he must have ferried across 
and the innumerable millions more who were still 
to get into his boat and ask about Heaven and God 
and receive disappointing answers appalled her and 
dulled her hope at the very beginning of the jour- 
ney. After all, it appeared that Hades was a 
dreary sort of place. She would have thought 
it might at least have been horrible or in some 
other way exciting. If Charon had only been 
kindly, or hateful, or grand, instead of being simply 
indifferent and stultified by his work! Her thrill 
of adventure faltered; was death going to be just 
like life? — She did not often indulge in thrills, hav- 
ing learned that nothing ever happens. If you 
thrilled in anticipation, you were sure to be disap- 
pointed. So Emily had found life and probably 
death was no different. . . . 

But presently she spoke again: "Isn't there any 
music in Hades?" 

"No," he answered, "No music." 

After a moment's pause, she went on: "Tell 
me," she said, "how shall I ever find the people 
I know, when 1 arrive over there?" 

"I shall land you where you belong." 



134 The Undertaker's Garland 

"Is every one who ever died in Hades?" 

"Vcs," he replied. 

"But aren't they all mixed up together? — I mean, 
the countries and the periods." 

"No: not much." 

"But why aren't they?" 

"Because people don't feel at home down here in 
other countries and ages than their own any more 
than they do on earth." 

"But 1 should think the chances to meet people 
would be so terribly interesting — with everybody 
who has ever died from the beginning of the world to 
choose from." 

"They don't like anybody who has lived any dif- 
ferently from themselves. I'hey keep to the same 
little groups. It is just the same as on earth." 

They were nearing the shore now; it lay like a 
grey line on the water. She strained her eyes, in 
the dimness, to make out what it was like; as the 
boat came closer and closer it resembled more and 
more exactly the shore they had just left behind. 
She thought, in a gust of impatience, what was the 
use of having two shores, if they were both going to 
be just alike? She tried to tell herself again that 
everything was just like that in life, but she couldn't, 
for all her resignation, keep from feeling a little 
forlorn. She was going to see people, that was 
true — all sorts of people, perhaps: for she swore 
that, now she was dead, she was going to know more 
of the world; no little groups for her! — but the in- 



Emily In Fladcs 135 

dlliercncc of the old man, the greyness and vague- 
ness of the atmosphere, the Impression of nothing 
ever happening, of nothing ever expected to happen, 
chilled her heart with an apprehension of some 
ghastly disappointment. 

Still, she told herself as they arrived, It couldn't 
really be so bad; It must at least be very different 
and strange. . . . 

Charon pushed the boat with his oar till it stuck 
In the shallow water. "You can get out here," he 
said. 

"But I'll get my feet wet!" she protested. 
"Can't you push it up where It's dry?" 

"It doesn't matter," he replied. "You'll find 
that you can't feel the water." 

So she got out and stood on the beach and found 
that what he said was true; just as she could not 
feel the firmness of the ground, so she could not 
feel the coldness of the water that wavered about 
her bare feet. 

Then, as the old man said nothing more, but 
rested listlessly on his oars, she remembered some- 
thing she had heard about paying Charon with an 
obol. 

"I'm sorry I have no money," she explained. 
"Perhaps I can borrow some." 

"It doesn't matter," he replied. "There's no 
need for money here." 

"Why not?" 

"There's nothing to buy." 



136 The Undertaker's Garland 

"People don't eat here, I suppose." 
"No," he answered, "people don't eat." 
She turned and walked up the shore. There was 
no wall of darkness here; only a kind of flat wide 
plain with a misty uncertain horizon. She felt 
timid about going further; it was Impossible to see 
straight before you; the air was mysterious with 
shadows and there was no telling what was behind 
them. And then, she was almost undressed; she did 
not want to go among people; she would feel un- 
dignified and ridiculous — at a terrible disadvant- 
age. — But then, on the other hand, she could hardly 
stay on the shore. So she walked up among the 
shadows. 

She found it was rather like a fog; you could see 
Immediately around you, but you could not, except 
by glimpses, see anything very far away. Once she 
thought she caught a human shape that passed ob- 
scurely at a distance and she hurried on in terror. 
Then, right upon her, two shapes seemed to come 
around a shadowy corner and passed quite close at 
her side; and, staring fearfully in their faces, she 
recognized them as people she had known In the 
town where she had been born. They were an el- 
derly married couple, who had used to come to din- 
ner sometimes. The man was still wearing the 
suit he had had on when he was killed In a motor 
accident, on an election night celebration; and he 
was still displaying in his lapel an enormous cellu- 
loid button with the legend: "Vote for Taft." 



Emily in Hades 137 

But the woman, she was glad to note, wore a night- 
gown like her own, having died respectably in bed. 
They had never been happy together, but they now 
walked side by side, as if from sheer force of habit. 
Neither turned to Emily nor spoke; she could not 
even tell whether they had seen her. They passed 
on and dissolved in the shadows, two lifeless, colour- 
less beings, wandering slowly and in silence, with- 
out interest or aim. 

Then other shapes commenced to appear, moving 
singly or in groups; they were evidently all people 
from the place which had once been her home. 
They kept still to the same companions, she ob- 
served, as when they had actually lived there; the 
lawyer walked beside the doctor, the barber beside 
the tobacconist, and families who had hated each 
other but had continued to live together were by no 
means divided in death. And none of them noticed 
Emily any more than they noticed each other. It 
wounded her that people she had known, who, she 
had once supposed, had been fond of her, should 
not trouble to welcome her among them or be sorry 
she had died so young. As she walked on and on 
in the dusk and never heard a human voice, she 
decided at last that she must be brave and try speak- 
ing first to somebody. 

She was walking in what seemed to be a wide 
clearing in the shadows, rather like a large open 
field, and at the end of it she saw pacing slowly 
back and forth across its width the thin figure of a 



138 The Undertaker's Garland 

woman, with her licad bent toward the ^roiiiul. 
This was an opportunity, thought Mmily; slie would 
rather approach one pcrsori than a group and a 
woman, she somehow felt, would be better than a 
man. So she advanced shyly across the field and 
cut off the woman in her walk. 

"1 beg your pardon," she said, "but could you 
give mc some information?" 

The woman stopped abruptly in her steady and 
monotonous pacing and looked up with something 
of the uncertainty and apprehension of an old 
woman — though l^'mily could see that, when she 
died, she could not have been much above fifty. 

"What is it you want to know?" she asked, in a 
slightly petulant tone. 

"I'm trying to find my mother," explained Emily. 
"Her name is Mrs. Julius Allen." 

rhc woman scrutinized her a moment. "Aren't 
you Mmily Allen?" she asked. 

It was the Head Mistress of the boarding school 
to which iMnily had been sent in her teens; but she 
seemed to I'^mily much changed from the last time 
she had seen her. Her face, which had once been 
so severe, with so firm a mouth, seemed flaccid and 
distressful now, shaken and vexed by pain. 

""^'ou startled me," the woman went on. "I 
came back in here purposely so that I shouldn't be 
always pestered with the questions of newcomers. 
I advise you to do the same thing. You'll find it 
will save you a lot of bother." 



Emily in Hades 139 

She was no longer ii mistress and queen giving 
lofty warnings and commands to a miserable little 
girl, who stood terrified in her presence. With her 
first words the old relation of mistress and pupil 
was abandoned and she seemed to take it for 
granted that they were both poor creatures to- 
gether, with no further need for appearances on 
either side and no interest other than the avoidance 
of being disturbed, as if they had been "set" old 
bachelors or nervously peevish invalids. 

And Emily was profoundly shocked at her old 
superior's abjectness; she felt as if she had gone be- 
hind the scenes of a play, a play in which she had 
believed, and had seen the backs of the canvas trees 
and the actors washing off their paint. But her 
first dismay was succeeded by a swift and eager re- 
sentment. Why should she, a strong young girl, 
be classed with a peevish old woman? What did 
the teacher mean by speaking as if they were both 
convicts in a jail, old women in a poor-house? She, 
Emily, had been married, anyway. She was not a 
sallow sterile spinster. And, as she stood before 
that flat-chested figure in its shapeless undress of a 
kimono, she was proudly conscious of the little 
breasts that lifted her own girl's nightgown. 

And she fed this new resentment with all her old 
grievances against her. How many lies this woman 
had told her! What a lot of cant she had talked! 
How she had repressed and imprisoned her stu- 
dents and kept them from seeing young men, till 



140 The Undertaker's Garland 

they had been ready to fall In love with the doctor at 
the school or the man who brought papers in the 
morning! She had lectured them on purity and re- 
serve and their mission of inspiring their knights; 
they were to perform a function almost religious, 
to embody Tennysonian ideals. She had painted a 
figure in gleaming white with a worshipper kissing 
its hem. And she had somehow made them feel 
that love was something impious and unclean; she 
had infected Emily with a fear and distaste she had 
never quite got over, though it had greatly per- 
plexed and distressed her to guess that her husband 
should find her cold. He enjoyed love more than 
she did, she was sure of that, and she sometimes 
wondered if other women enjoyed love more than 
she. ... In any case, she was angry with the peo- 
ple at her old school, who had misrepresented love 
and left her to be harrowed by shocks more painful 
than any she could have had from the truth. 

She had stood silent for a moment, thrown off 
by the fatuous advice, but at last she suddenly burst 
out, with unaccustomed boldness and authority: 
"Let me ask you something," she demanded, "why 
did you never tell me anything?" 

The other seemed to wince a little, 

"Because I knew nothing myself," she said. 

"But I suffered for believing your lies," the girl 
cruelly went on. "You did us all a great injury. 
After all, we were all young girls. You should 
have taught us something about love along with the 



Emily in Hades 141 

trigonometry. That was going to be the business 
of most of us!" 

"Ah, why do you tell me all this?" cried the 
woman, appealing to Emily with eyes full of bitter- 
ness and grief. "I hav^e suffered much worse than 
you, because I have lived much longer, and because 
I lived all that time by the light of my own teach- 
ing. I could not throw it off as easily as you could 
when you left me. It was like an armour about me ; 
I carried it all my life. You see, I believed in reli- 
gion. I thought I was serving God. I believed 
that everything I sacrificed would be made up to me 
after I died. And now it seems that, after all, re- 
ligion wasn't really true and there's nothing but this 
pagan Hell. How could I have known that?" 

"Oh, forgive me, forgive me!" begged Emily. 
"I'm terribly sorry!" And in shame and distress 
at having scolded this anguished and defeated crea- 
ture, she tried to take her by the hand and kiss her 
on the cheek, but the hand was not warm in her own 
and her lips felt nothing against them. "I'm sorry, 
I'm sorry," she repeated. 

"It doesn't matter," said the teacher. "Nothing 
really matters here." And at this Emily felt un- 
comfortable, as she had at old Charon's indifference, 
and a chill, almost of resentment, made her almost 
cold again. But she still protested: "I'm sorry! 
I shouldn't ever have blamed you." 

"I don't know v/ho's to blame," said the other. 
"I believed in the best ideals I could find. It seems 



142 The Undertaker's Garland 

unfair that they should have won me nothing and 
that, instead of helping other people, they should 
actually have done them harm." 

"But at least they won you security. They won 
you time for study and work." 

"Oh, security!" sighed the woman. "I have 
plenty of security here!" 

And again the girl felt -uneasy. She changed the 
subject abruptly: "I don't suppose you can tell me 
how to find my mother." 

"I'm afraid not," said the teacher. "You'll just 
have to wander around. But I shouldn't worry 
about it. . . . You have all eternity before you," 
she ended, with a sad smile. 

So Emily set out again in that faded unreal world. 
She asked almost everybody she met if he knew 
where her mother was. Most of them simply shook 
their heads and did not even stop to talk to her; a 
few of them remembered having seen her mother, 
but could not tell how long ago, because there was 
no day or night in Hades and consequently no way 
to tell time; it was equally impossible to give direc- 
tions for reaching any particular place, because the 
ground was perfectly bare and there was nothing 
above it but the shadows, which kept imperceptibly 
shifting and melting into one another. 

But at last she came upon a group of women sit- 
ting in a sort of circle. She recognized her mother 
at once, though she was approaching her from be- 
hind, by the little hard knob of black hair which she 



Emily in Hades 143 

wore at the back of her head. She had always felt 
that this knob was depressingly old-fashioned and 
had often wondered why her mother had imitated 
her grandmother in this, brushing her thin hair 
straight back and parting it in the middle. 

The other women, she now saw, were her grand- 
mother and her aunts. She stood on the edge of the 
circle and sent them an eager "Hello!" 

"Why, if It isn't Emily!" said Aunt Mollie, with 
a benign and fatuous smile. "I always said Emily 
would come. — All things come to him who waits !" 
she added with another smile. 

Her mother raised solemnly upon Emily her large 
and gentle eyes, in which was neither happiness nor 
sorrow, but only a prosaic seriousness and a mild 
sort of wonder. Her long preoccupation in life 
with kitchens and house-work and furniture and the 
more physical aspects of the care of her husband and 
children had invested her with the soulless dignity of 
a plain mahogany bed; and, now that she had come 
to Hades, where there was nothing more for her to 
do, she seemed ready to sit through eternity, as if 
she were a chest of drawers, content in the convic- 
tion of her usefulness and the sense of her duties 
discharged. 

"Why, Emily!" she exclaimed. "I didn't expect 
you so soon." 

"Well, here I am," said Emily. 

"What did you die of, dear?" 

"Influenza." 



144 The Undertaker's Garland 

"What a pity!" sighed Emily's mother. "And 
you married so well, too." 

People felt no grief, it seemed, in Hades, that 
other people should be dead; they merely took it 
for granted; every one died sooner or later. Even 
her mother, whose expression of regret was the first 
she had heard, seemed to take her daughter's early 
death with a disconcerting calmness. 

"How is Fred?" her mother went on. 

"Very well, the last I heard." 

"How is the baby?" 

"All right." 

"You haven't had a baby yourself, have you, 
Emily?" 

"No." 

"Is Marjorie all right?" 

"Yes: I think so." 

"Well," her mother concluded, "It's nice to have 
you here. You can just sit around with us here and 
after awhile the others will be along and then we'll 
all be together." 

"But what should I do here?" demanded Emily, 
flashing with resentment again. "I don't see that 
there's anything very interesting about what you're 
doing!" 

"It's a nice long rest," said her mother. 

"Nothing's very interesting down here," put in 
her Aunt Elmira. 

"I don't care," observed Aunt MoUie. "What I 



Emily in Hades 145 

always say is they can say what they please, but / 
believe there's a God. It'll all come out all right 
in the end; now you wait and see if it doesn't." 

"But I don't want to stay with you here 1" cried 
Emily, who had never liked Aunt Mollie. "You 
kept me with you all my life. You tried to make 
me think that our little family was the whole world. 
— I never went anywhere and I never found out any- 
thing. You made me believe that all I had to do 
to be desirable for some one to marry was not to do 
certain things — not to be 'unladylike.' I remember 
that, when I was a little girl, you warned me just as 
impressively as if it had been one of the Command- 
ments that I must never look into a barber shop 
when I was passing by in the street. You never let 
me know what marriage was and let me get married 
without knowing. You only wept at the wedding 
and told me it was all very solemn — till I felt as if 
getting married must be some kind of catastrophe !" 

"Why, Emily," answered her mother, "how can 
you talk like that? If you had been brought up the 
way I was, you wouldn't think I was so strict. 
Why, my father wouldn't let us read the newspapers 
or play games on Sunday or anything. And he 
wouldn't let us go to dances, because he thought 
dancing was wicked. In West Beachley there 
weren't any of those Saturday night parties that last 
till Sunday morning. We had to toe the mark, I 
can tell you, in my day. — Why, at Norwood, I used 



146 The Undertaker's Garland 

to let you children do practically anything you 
wanted to — anything decent and respectable, that 
is." 

And Emily realized fully for the first time in her 
life that to her mother the change from West Beach- 
ley to Norwood had been as much a rise and libera- 
tion as the change from Norwood to New York had 
been to Emily herself. When her mother had mar- 
ried the General Manager of the Norwood Woolen 
Mills, she had found herself in a world so much 
richer and freer than the one she had left behind 
that she had never thought to look further, but, in 
satisfaction and assurance, had lived and died among 
its standards. 

"I'm sorry, mother," said Emily. "Never mind. 
I shouldn't have tried to blame you. But I'm afraid 
I can't stay with you here. I want to look up some 
other people in a minute. — I'll be back to see you 
later." And, after talking with them a little — 
in order not to seem too abrupt — she left them with 
phantom kisses and lost herself again in the grey. 

"Oh, I wish I could find some one young," she 
thought, "some one I really like !" 

Then suddenly, a moment afterwards, like a god 
appearing in a mist, a naked young man came to- 
wards her, who looked in her face and cried out, in a 
voice that sounded almost alive: "Why, Emily! 
What are you doing here?" 

"Oh, I'm so glad to see you !" she exclaimed. "I 
just died." 



Emily in Hades 147 

"You've come to a pretty sad place," he replied, 
with a sorrowful smile. 

"Is it so depressing then?" 

"There isn't very much doing. You get kind of 
stale after while." 

She hesitated a moment. "Isn't there any music 
here?" 

"I haven't heard any," he replied. 

In a second, she had changed the subject: "It 
was terrible about your death. I cried about it for 
days." 

"Well, It was darn nice of you to be sorry," he 
said, "but you shouldn't have let it worry you. I 
guess it really doesn't make much difference." 

"We were all so proud, though, that you were 
killed at St. Mihiel!" 

"Well, I don't know what the death notice said, 
but I was 'way behind the lines. I was an M. P. 
and had to go around and drive 'em out of the cafes 
at half past nine; and one night some dirty wop hid 
up an alley and shot me." 

"Oh, how dreadful !" she cried. 

As he spoke, he had tapped his left breast, where 
she saw a black bullet wound. — And she also saw 
what she had hardly dared to let herself notice be- 
fore : that, in his nakedness, he was very hand- 
some. As she had known him in life, his clothes 
had not been particularly neat and she was surprised 
now at the clear outline and ordered economy of his 
body. Instead of being like her husband, with most 



148 The Undertaker's Garland 

■ ^—^^—i ^^^ 

of his muscles invisible, she could see them move, 
smoothly and easily, as he shifted his position. 
Though she had always been attracted by him in 
life and tremendously excited when he had called 
upon her, she found it almost incredible now that 
anybody so beautiful could have lived in a city like 
Norwood and gone about its commonplace business. 
And she observed that even his feet, instead of be- 
ing great slabs of flesh, were high-arched and square- 
toed and no longer or wider than they should be. 

He was not embarrassed by his nakedness and 
made no comment upon it — though she herself had 
been abashed at meeting him without his clothes — 
but stood with an unperturbed dignity and a cool 
unconscious grace, moving his arms occasionally as 
he talked, in the artless and homely gestures of the 
undistinguished American, 

"Tell me," she went on, playing the game of mak- 
ing conversation, as she had always done with him in 
life, "what do the soldiers who are dead think about 
the war, now that it's over? Do they think it was 
all worth while or do they think they 'died in vain'? 
Some people are saying one thing and some people 
the other." 

"They never think about it at all. It was all so 
bum, why should they? You see, about the only 
thing you can do to amuse yourself in Hades is to 
remember the pleasant things that happened to you 
when you were alive. So they have practically for- 
gotten the war. ... I know how I felt about it 



Emily in Hades 149 

when I first arrived down here: I ripped my darn 
uniform off and pitched it in the lake." 

"But doesn't anybody object to your not wearing 
any clothes?" she asked, with a smile which she felt 
was daring. 

"No: nobody objects to anything down here." 
And he added, after a pause : "Why don't you take 
your nightgown off? Nobody cares." 

It was her turn to pause now. "I suppose I 
might," she said at last. "This isn't much of a 
thing to go around in, is it?" And she took the 
nightgown off self-consciously, pulling it over her 
head, and stood before him in her slender beauty, 
with her thin boy-like thighs and her breasts that 
hung like rain-drops on a pane, and the low-swelling 
rondure between them that had never borne a child. 

"You certainly are pretty!" he said, as she stood 
not quite knowing what to do, and then came over 
to her and first took her hands in his and then put 
his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth. 

But she could not feel his body against hers nor 
the pressure of his lips; she did not grow hot nor 
tremble at the touch of his lover's hands. When 
she shut her eyes beneath his kiss, it was as if there 
were no one there, and she had to open them upon 
him to take pleasure in his presence. 

And presently he relinquished his embrace and 
stood awkwardly, in silence, keeping only her hands. 
"It's too bad," he said at length, "that I never made 
love to you. in life." 



150 The Undertaker's Garland 

"Why didn't you?" she asked. "You should 
have. I wanted you to." 

"Did you really?" he replied, and stood staring 
at the ground a moment. "I was too chivalrous," 
he went on. "I was idealistic about things like that. 
I couldn't have married you then and I thought I 
oughtn't to make love to you. I thought you 
wouldn't want me to, if I didn't ask you to marry 
me; and that, even if you were willing to let m'e, it 
wouldn't be exactly honourable. But I know now 
I made a mistake. That kind of chivalry's all 
bunk: I -found that out in France." 

"Did you ever think of me in France?" she asked, 
and he answered: "Yes, I surely did" — but w^ith 
so little of the lover's enthusiasm that she felt quite 
sure the French women must have driven her out 
of his head. 

"I thought of you, too," she said. "I missed you 
a lot." 

"It's too bad," he protested again. "It's too 
bad." Then, "Let's sit down here together," he 
invited. "There's no place to go." 

So they sat down together on the ground and he 
put his arm about her body. But she was thinking 
how vivacious and attractive the French women must 
be. She felt charmless and pale, as she imagined 
them, and it filled her with a strange distress. She 
would like so much to be like them, if she only had 
the chance ! 

And then she realized suddenly that she would 



Emily in Hades 151 

never have the chance — that she was nothing but 
a poor ghost, a bodiless, passionless shadow! She 
had told herself up to now that the languid people 
she had met were all old and stupid people, who 
were dead things before they died. But, in the pres- 
ence of this young man, who might once have 
thrilled her with his touch, but who stirred her less 
now than a lover she might merely have imagined 
when alive, she knew with sickening despair and sud- 
den terrible grief, that she was only a shadow her- 
self, that her flesh would never live again, that she 
must walk among indifferent wraiths till she became 
as indifferent as they — a wisp of spirit lost for ever 
in a world of twilight and mists. 

They sat on together in silence; their love scene 
seemed to go blank. A listlessness had absorbed 
him and he sat staring blindly at her hand, which he 
could not press with his own. A fear and a shame 
possessed her and an anger which wept without 
tears. She must be alone, she felt; she must rouse 
herself and escape. 

She brusquely got to her feet. "I want to go 
on," she said. "I'll see you again very soon." 

"Hey, don't go, Emily!" he cried. — But, for 
dread of having him tell her it was useless, she 
broke away and plunged among the shadows. 

His numbness seemed still to hold him, for he 
had not risen from the* ground. . . . 

She came at last to the shore, which seemed al- 
most picturesque now, after the grey monotony of 



152 The Undertaker's Garland 

^^^^ 

the interior. Not far away, she saw Charon un- 
loading another newcomer, a tall rather fine-looking 
man with a clerical collar, who gazed about him in 
a puzzled way and then came up the beach. 

"I beg your pardon," he said, "but can you tell 
me whether this is Heaven or Hell?" 

"It's neither," she replied. It's what they call 
Hades." 

"That is strange," he remarked thoughtfully, 
bending troubled brows a moment. "This must be 
a dream." 

"Oh, no! It's not a dream," she said bitterly. 
"You're really dead." 

"And what does one do here?" he inquired, rais- 
ing shy and honest eyes to hers. 

"Not much of anything, as far as I can see!" she 
answered in her anger and chagrin, and then, as she 
saw that he was hurt by this harsh and abrupt dis- 
illusionment, she was sorry for him and added, to 
soften the shock a little: "If you go further back 
from the shore, you'll find the people you know." 

"Thank you very much," he replied, and walked 
slowly up toward the shadows. 

Terror shrouded her heart; she was sickened by 
the realization that the answer she had just given 
the clergyman was horribly like the answers she had 
received when she first arrived in Hades. She 
had come just like that poor man, with hopes and 
interests and desires; and now, in so short a time, her 
attitude toward him was exactly like theirs toward 



Emily in Hades 153 

her: morose, indifferent to others, unwilling to be 
questioned at all — because it reminded one too 
sharply of one's own first blank failures and wounds. 

She suddenly ran down to Charon, who was just 
pulling off from the shore. 

"Oh, won't you take me away from here, please ?" 
she cried. "Take me to some other country — 
somewhere where the people are different! I want 
to see people entirely different from these people 
here ! There must be millions of people more in- 
teresting than these — people who lived in Europe 
hundreds of years ago." (She was thinking of the 
picturesque figures in historical romances.) "I've 
never been to Europe in my life. Won't you take 
me where the Europeans are?" 

"All right. Get in," assented Charon. "But 
you'll find it doesn't make much difference in the 
long run." 

She stretched herself on her back, to think, at 
the bottom of the boat, and stared up at the desert of 
sky, which was everywhere the same. There was no 
play of shadows here, but a topless height of space. 
It must be infinity, she thought. One looked up and 
lost oneself in deep unvaulted distances, where there 
were no sun and no stars for the homeless eye to 
cling to and for the imagination to accept as a sort of 
ceiling for the world. And there was no air to col- 
our space with comfortable layers of blue; the abyss 
was perfectly colourless, at once limpid and dim. It 
was infinity, it was nothing; it affronted and terri- 



154 The Undertaker's Garland 

fied the soul. One was drowned in it as one looked ; 
one was choked, like a fish out of the water, filled 
to bursting with that vast negation, which one could 
neither breathe nor feel. 

She turned away swimming eyes and watched the 
passing of the shore. So exactly alike was every part 
to every other part that she would not have known 
they were moving at all, if it had not been for the 
furrows which streaked the dim water faintly in 
lines that flickered a little. And as she watched for 
uncounted hours the interminable ribbon of the land 
lying low and narrow and dark beneath its burden of 
shadows, the passionate impulse to revolt, the fierce 
demand for life and colour, all the shuddering intol- 
erable anguish of her baffled and breaking heart 
seemed to melt away in the air, as if it were ab- 
sorbed by space, seemed to fade and dull and go to 
sleep, leaving listless vacuity behind them, like high 
resolutions forgotten in the heat of a summer 
day. . . . 

At last, they turned in toward the shore. She 
gazed languidly before her. What she saw did not 
differ at all from the shore they had just left be- 
hind and she contemplated it without thought, un- 
mindful of what she had come for. . . . 

Charon roused her when they were beached. 
"You can get out now," he said. 

She summoned her attention with an effort and 
climbed down out of the boat. A little of her hope 
returned; she felt a faint echo of excitement. 



Emily in Hades 155 

"Are the people really different here?" 

"Yes: they're different," said the old man; and 
he put out to sea again. 

And again she confronted the barren shore, with 
its blurred forest of shadows. . . . 

A figure stood before her, a figure in a long gown. 
She could not tell at first whether it was a woman or 
a man, but, when she had come quite close, she saw 
that it was a man, who wore his hair rather long 
and dressed in high stockings, like tights. His com- 
plexion was very dark and his eyes were so large and 
black that, with no light to make them shine, they 
looked like great oval pits sunk deep beneath his 
brows. 

"I beg your pardon," she said, "but can you tell 
me where I am?" 

"This is Greece," the man replied, — "Greece of 
the Vllth century before Christ." He spoke with 
a curious accent. 

"And are you a Greek?" she inquired. 

"No: I am an Italian," he answered, " — an Ital- 
ian of the XVIth century. I am a stranger here 
like yourself." He smiled a little as he spoke and 
she felt that she was going to like him. He had not 
the hangdog look of the Americans she had met, 
but held himself even in Hades with a certain dig- 
nity and pride. 

"I am an American," she explained, "but I don't 
want to stay with the Americans." 

"What is it you want?" he asked. 



156 The Undertaker's Garland 

"Oh, I don't know!" she repHed. "More life, 
I suppose." 

"Don't you know there is no life here?" he said 
gently. "You must not look for life here." 

"I want a different kind of people then," she got 
out, feeling helpless and foolish. 

"I know," he answered, "I know ... I wanted a 
different kind of people, too, when I first came down 
to Hades. I had fallen in love with the Greece 
that was dead and I thought my own time a bar- 
barous one. Now, the people of your age, I am 
told, think my own century very beautiful." 

"And is that the reason you came here?" 

"That was a part of the reason. But it was not 
only Greece I loved." 

"Oh, tell me what love was like," she begged, 
"when you were alive. That's what I want to hear 
so much. Please tell me what love was like then !" 

He smiled again. "Did you think that love was 
more perfect then than now? Did you think I 
should tell you some wonderful tale of desire ful- 
filled and still kept? Ah, never since Daphne 
turned to laurel was desire so little satisfied as mine. 
F'or even the nuns who espouse Jesus Christ have 
their husband after a fashion; and even Dante pos- 
sessed Beatrice by believing it was her spirit he wor- 
shipped and by recreating that spirit himself more 
noble than it ever really was. But for me there 
was no mystic union and no high exaltation of the 



Emily in Hades 157 

soul. I had nothing but torture and burning thirst 
and intolerable longing! 

"I was a poet and scholar on earth — a scholar 
who knew Greek. That was a rare thing in my 
time, because Greek had been buried for centuries. 
When we first read Plato and Homer, our minds 
seemed flooded with the sun. We rode through the 
country to rescue Greek from the ignorance of the 
monasteries, as our ancestors had ridden to save Pal- 
estine from the hands of the unbeliever. I rode in 
the service of Apollo; but Apollo destroys his ser- 
vants. For one day I found the poems of Sappho in 
the filthy refectory of a monastery. It was a greasy 
and worm-eaten volume wounded with great holes 
and stains, and scrawled by the swinish monks with 
caricatures and accounts. But to me it was as if a 
goddess had been lifted again from the earth, 
not merely in the coldness of marble, dull and silent 
and stiff, but moving in divine beauty, with divine 
music on her lips. For we had thought Sappho 
lost forever, when our barbarous ancestors burned 
her poems. 

"With the scholar's jealous greed, I told no one 
v/hat I had found. There were better scholars than 
I; I could not have borne to have them read it 
sooner. With the little Greek that I knew and the 
strangeness of the dialect, (though it seemed to me 
that the ^Eolian forms did but make them darker 
and richer), it was more than two years before the 



158 The Undertaker's Garland 

poems had dropped their masks for my eyes. But 
when I had forced the forest of the text, all bristling 
and tangled to the eye, to give up the beauty It con- 
cealed, I was straightway an adorer and slave ! — It 
was a woman shaken by passion, yet with the cold 
intelligence of a man, an artist controlling her ter- 
rible cries with the subtle conscience of a critic. 
Who ever heard of such a woman? — a woman with 
passion and reason, and a supreme poet as well ! I 
loved her as I had never loved any real living 
woman, yet she troubled and tortured my soul. 
Not only was I troubled as all men are troubled by 
women who choose women for lovers, but I was 
driven mad to realize that no lover, either woman 
or man, could ever quench her fierce longing or cure 
her noble chagrin. — Here was a woman whom no 
lover could satisfy, who could never find love final. 
She gave herself up to beauty with a passion that 
never scrupled; but at the end there was always bit- 
terness : love lasted such a little while ; it was not she 
who did not want to keep it. It was not she who 
slew It so soon; she grieved its death as much as any. 

The cadence "Hpa/xav fJ.ev eyw (TtOtv^ "AtOl^ TTciAat Trora 

— 'Once did I love thee, Atthls, long ago' — de- 
stroyed my soul with its beauty and Its cruel definlte- 
ness. — I shuddered with the fear that, even had I 
lived in Lesbos, I could never really have possessed 
her. 

"I shut myself up from the common world. I no 
longer cared for my friends: however brilliant they 



Emily in Hades 159 

might be, they had not Sappho's passion; and still 
less could I bear common women : however beautiful 
or eager, they appeared to me now in my madness 
like gross, less than human creatures; beside this 
half-male woman, they were hardly women at all; 
the smoothness and roundness of their bodies, which 
had once consumed me with delight, had now no 
more magic for me than the smoothness and round- 
ness of worms. — At last, I could neither sleep nor 
work. I could think of nothing but Sappho. All 
day and all night the music of her poems sounded 
exquisitely through my mind and every lift and fall 
of its beauty gave me exquisite pain. I stumbled 
about my business, leaving everything unfinished; I 
would suddenly stop, like a madman, in the midst 
of what I was doing, and stand dazed and unseeing 
for hours, crucified by that strange jealousy. Till, 
at last one day, insane, in a rage against the cruel 
beauty which had robbed me of my own life and for- 
bidden me to live in hers, I burned all my copies of 
the poems, that men might never suffer by them, and 
then, taking ship for the East, threw my body into 
the sea — and desire ceased with my breath.". . . 
But to Emily the story seemed fantastic and un- 
intelligible. He was interested in his life, it was 
true; which none of the Americans had been; though 
he had been dead for hundreds of years before they 
were born. But all this passion about a book ! She 
thought that he must be mad; he had said some- 
thing about madness in his story. — And, besides, her 



i6o The Undertaker's Garland 

attention had flagged; she was deadened by languor 
again; and the passionate language he spoke 
was one she had never learned. . . . 

"Did you come here to see Sappho?" she asked. 

"Yes. I have been here ever since I died." 

"I should like to see her, too," she said, though, 
now that she was back in history, she found that it 
interested her less than she had thought it would. 

"You must let me take you to her," he answered, 
and led her up towards the shadows. 

"But how can I talk to her?" asked Emily. "She 
can't understand English, can she?" 

"Oh, yes," said the scholar, "she has learned it." 

"But do people learn things down here? The 
Americans I saw back there weren't learning or do- 
ing anything." 

"It depends on one's interest in life," he explained. 

"If one's love for it is strong enough, one goes on 
being interested for a while; but in the end one's in- 
terest always flags and finally dissolves altogether. 
When I first came to Hades, for example, I was 
eager to learn Greek from the Greeks and I studied 
it here for a while; but now I do not trouble any 
longer. Even Sappho, whose thirsty mind went on 
drinking knowledge for ages, has ceased to be thirsty 
at last." 

"And does everything fade then? Does nothing 
remain in Hades?" 

"Only beauty," he replied, "the memory of 
beauty.". . . 



Emily in Hades i6i 

But she did not understand. Walking passively 
at his side, she felt that historical people were liter- 
ary and dull. No doubt Sappho was a "highbrow," 
too. . , . 

And at last they came to a woman sitting naked 
on the ground. She was not beautiful with the 
classic exactness which Emily had seen in pictures 
of her. Indeed, her features in themselves were 
plain — except for the large dark eyes; the nose 
was much too prominent, with nostrils very large, 
and the mouth was wide, like a man's. But her 
proud body was so beautiful that it terrified Emily 
a little; the breasts were neither flabby nor flat, like 
the breasts of many women she had seen, and she 
bore them with the same dignity and grace as she 
held her alert little head; and the legs, which were 
folded beneath her, were very smooth and strong. 
And, though now but the surface of a shadow, with- 
out blood or freshness or light, her dark skin seemed 
even in Hades to glow with a kind of lustre, that 
showed sharply against the dimness, almost with the 
brightness of flesh. 

As she gazed at this figure — as little self-con- 
scious, as little soft as a man's — Emily felt herself 
terribly ashamed of her own meagre body and 
wished that she had not left her night-gown. How 
thin, how wretched she appeared! What a bony 
little scarecrow of a creature! She wished she had 
never come; it was scarcely worth the discomfort. 
She wanted now only to get away, to be somewhere 



1 62 The Undertaker's Garland 

by herself, where she could forget all these ghastly 
meetings, where she would never have to think about 
anything! Everything in life was like that; she de- 
sired now only to resign herself. 

But the woman looked up in her face with a quick 
and inquiring Interest. Emily had seen nothing so 
vivid in Hades. 

"This is a little Amerian girl who has come a long 
way to see you," the scholar began to explain. 

Something In that strange plain face, so dark- 
ened with a knowledge and passion which were un- 
familiar to Emily and which troubled and frightened 
her a little, but so beautiful even in its phantom 
from the hot Intensity of the spirit, which still 
smouldered and brooded In Hades, like an Inextin- 
guishable flame, moved Emily to burst out abruptly, 
In a violent unsteady voice, with all that was left of 
her rebellion and her desperate chagrin: 

"Oh, you have known love," she cried. "Tell me : 
why have I never known love? All my life I have 
waited for it, but It was never love that came to me. 
Must I wait forever down here, without even the 
hope of knowing It? Am I Incapable of love? 
Who Is it who has robbed me of It? Did people live 
so very differently, then, when you were on earth? 
Were there young girls then as free and brave and 
as beautiful as you? Tell me, tell me ! What must 
I do to become as you were then? What dreams 
did you let yourselves dream? What thoughts of 
men did you think? Was there once another sort 



Emily in Hades 163 

of lov^e less clumsy and unkind than now? Is love 
cooling off like the sun? Did it die with the an- 
cient world?" 

The woman's face seemed to darken, almost as 
if it were flushing. But she did not speak for a 
moment. And Emily, abashed at her speech, 
dropped piteous eyes to the ground; they fell upon 
a kind of harp, with graceful lines like a vase. 
For a moment, a spring of hope and relief was 
opened in her heart, as it occurred to her that here 
at last she was perhaps going to listen to the music 
she had waited for all her life. 

"Do you play on this?" she asked shyly. 

"No," said Sappho, "my lyre is broken." 

And then Emily noticed that, indeed, the strings 
were twisted like tendrils on the shafts of the nar- 
row frame. 

She looked up in disappointment and saw that the 
woman was weeping. 

"Oh, don't cry on my account!" she exclaimed, "I 
really don't mind being dead!" 

"It is not because you are dead that I am weep- 
ing," she replied, and then drew Emily down with 
beautiful shadowy arms whose embrace she could 
not feel. "Sit down beside me here," she said. "I 
wish that I could help you, my poor child. But I 
cannot help you now!" 



The Death of God 

My spirit is a bow unstrung, 
My strength is as a twisted pod, 
Yet I remember, once, a young 
Exultant, wind-flushed, passionate god — 
Who fled down the green colourless wave, 
Burning the silence with a glittering scale. 
Yet found no coral and no sea's floor; 
Who plunged and soared and poised, but gave 
Care to no thought but that his flail 
Threshed a gold sheaf on an idle floor; 
Who knew not whence he came, nor cared 
While there remained that opening door 
And a cloudy flight of palaces, staired 
With mirrors, fragments of a separate sun. 
Ages were woven and woven, unspun. 
Before the delight of winnowed hair. 
Of diving sheer from the whirlwind's brim, 
Of feeling the runnels of space on bare 
Unwearied limbs could weary him. 
But slowly a questionless vast despair 
Hooded his brain; on his heart an ache 
Knocked like a sword against the thigh. 
The winds were no longer stiff to slake 
The thirst I had — for the god was 1 1 
Centuries circled past with a cry 

164 



The Death of God 165 

Like baying hounds. At last I arose 
And plunged into the burning gyres 
Where the intensest sun-slag glows, 
And churned the spindrift till it whirled 
Rocketing colours, metallic fires, 
Vermilion, cobalt, frost and black-rose. 
Urged by a blind, dark, sultry lust 
I trampled the blazoned clouds of dust 
Like a wild stallion in a pound — 
Fire upon dust, dust upon spark — 
Till a huge uncouth unthought of world 
Went toppling blindly down the dark 
With a hot unwieldy sound: 
And wonder was then like a sudden wound! 

Ages and ages were smuggled away 

While I shaped with slowly subtle hand 

A universe I had not planned: 

Suns of inviolate sapphire burning 

With stars to circle upon their light. 

Choruses to one high voice returning; 

Suns of amber and bluish light. 

Shaken like dew on the boughs of night; 

Comets with fluttering fetlocks and long tossing 

manes, 
Plunging in triumph against their stiff reins. 
Thudding a dust of white fire from their hoofs; 
And the stars that have stars for company 
When they sit at feast under heaven's roofs 
And utter a sweet articulate cry. 



i66 The Undertaker's Garland 

Then out of a white wind wandering came 

Lovely spirits nimbed in flame 

Even against that illumined air; 

Stripling they moved, 

Bending each on each a remote stare 

From arrogant eyes that were wise in love, 

Dripping a sun's rain from smooth thighs 

As they moved. 

And some of them had strength enough 

To have followed with speed, unsandalled, un- 

mewed. 
The galloping thunders of the sun; 
And some wore pointed wings upon 
Poised and tremulous heels, subdued — 
With a thin crescent of lifted wings, 
Ivory-rich misted with silver — the flame 
Which dawned a rose ardour from bright hair 
Kindled and unbound by the great pair 
Which from their shoulders beat or fluttered. 
But all were courteous in their pride 
Save one, lucescent as his name. 
Who, when he would have spoken, uttered 
A thin cry, dropped to his knees, and gazed 
Down where the stars were, intricately mazed 
As gleams of green phosphorus in the tide; 
Crouched in a glare like one who has sent 
Thick bloodhounds on his own son's scent 
And looks into a network of winds. 
Then gathering to his feet 
He made as if his hands would beat 



The De ath of God 167 

A dancing measure; and a song 
Demon-sweet and wild and strong 
Made his face strange — a song of light 
And colours wheeling in the light, 
Vermilion, saffron, blue-green and blue, 
And the blind and unimaginable hue 
Which trembles beyond the terror of white; 
All things that were and things unknown : 
Blindness of suns and staggering stars. 
The red-brass pomp of battle cars, 
The scraping of spears against a throne. 
And all that high unsorrowing throng 
Were hid from each other by their tears, 
And pressed white brows, because of the song 
Which Lucifer made among his peers. 
And I too, sitting among them there. 
Knew beauty's intimate despair. 
And dreamed of a green, wide-islanded star 
With one white moon to follow her, 
A place where immortal beauty should sit 
With mortal eyes to ponder it. 

And afterwards I remember, remember, 

We sat like stars in the sun's feast chamber, 

And I shared with them my mind; 

And brooding upon their litheness assigned 

Each a rollicking planet to ride, 

A moon to tame, or to sit upon 

A huge, unruly, turbulent sun. 

I taught them all my wit had learned. 



i68 The Undertaker's Garland 

How starry speed was qualified 

By bulk and distance; why this one burned 

And that rolled darkling: all that I knew 

And all I guessed might well be true. 

They leapt and clashed their ivory spears, 

And shouted; and down through the regions of 

night and morn 
Fled like partridges frightened from corn. 
I turned that none might see my tears. 

And after, long after, I shaped a star 

With one white moon to follow her. 

A place where immortal beauty should sit 

With mortal eyes to ponder it. 

There out of odour, sound and colour 

I made those shapes which seemed to wear 

In the bronze lustre of that undimmed air 

A beauty elaborate and austere, 

Which now is shadowed, or grown duller 

Than an old man's wit to a young man's ear. 

I made all forms of greenery 
Under the air or beneath the sea: 
The tree that like a fountain soars. 
The tree that like a cloud downpours 
In a rustling rain of silver leaves; 
The tree whose petals are gold at noon 
And moonlight coloured in the moon; 
And every sort of tree that weaves 



The Death of God 169 

A net of leaves from limb to limb. 

I made green beetles smouldering dim 

And pheasants fanned to a golden glare 

In the white furnace of the air: 

And the many strange sea-breathing things 

Which sprawl in jellies and coil in rings, 

Dripping slow slime from viscous eyes 

Amid the deep sea's forestries. 

I made the spider obese and hairy 

And taught him to spin and thread an airy 

Web of colourless polygons, 

And shook against the twisted skein 

Cool bubbles of translucent dew, 

Violet-gold, and Irised rain 

The first windy light comes through 

When hills are lowered before the dawn. 

And still I might feel my breath indrawn 

Could I but see that murderous seine 

Dredging fat flies from the streams of air 

And ugliness dragging up unaware 

The careless iridescent dawn. 

I made when I had learned to smile 
The knobbed and scaly crocodile, 
Blue-buttocked, feathery-whiskered apes, 
And monkeys with brown tendril shapes; 
I made when I had learned to laugh 
The painted ludicrous giraffe. 
The sluggish hippopotamus, 



170 The Undertaker's Garland 

Leathery, lewd, preposterous: 

The dwarfed and bulked grotesquery 

Under the winds and beneath the sea. 

But beauty alone had terror 

To lay delight on my youth, so that I shook 

As when the first of morning ripples to clearer 

Green the swift lustres of a brook. 

And a naked bather wades and is chill. 

Yet never was I so seamed with pain, 

And for her sake, that not one vein 

Was quiet, and carved in wind I ran, 

As when the hour was come to fulfil 

The breathing body of man. 

Lying unstirred, one knee upturned, 

Through ruddy loose hair and the broad 

Sloped shoulders, down to the noble thigh, there 

burned 
The gracious indolent ardour and 
Cloudy repose of a god. 
I breathed on his face, and my breath 
Went sharp through his side; stretched out my 

hand — 
A shudder of light tumbled his hair. 
And he turned his sleep to a stare, aware 
Of beauty and aware of death. 
And something came back to my blood, I recalled 
Lucifer's face, and the circled crowd — 
Dim crescents of wings, flushed faces enthralled. 
And the lifted throat despair had made proud ! 



The Death of God 171 

It is long since I have done aught but look. 

Through blinkered eyes at images 

Which once had halted my heart's blood, 

As an old man shrunk to a hood 

Sits quiet, pondering a book, 

For which in his youth he had foregone ease, 

Or the mouth of a girl, or gold. 

Crouched over my bones and old, 

I have long leaned chin upon wrist 

And let my thought twist and untwist 

Like a black weed dragged in a stream, 

And wondered indeed if I exist, 

Or am but the end of a dream. 

Ah, why must all things come upon trouble 

And all that sultry passion seem 

A rustle of wind in the dry stubble — 

Unless from the first I failed in thought? 

The wheels of the chariots were wrought 
Of purest bronze, but with a broken rim; 
The unshod chargers fell in the long wars. 
For all their silver ribaldry the stars 
Go mad in their courses, a dry skull 
Rots where the moon was beautiful; 
The suns were pocked at birth with scars. 

Oh, violent and young, distraught 
And exulted with undrunk wine, I brought 
Vast splendours from the earlier night. 
Yet failed because I held in despite 
The labour and repose of thought. 



172 The Undertaker's Garland 

Is this shrunk star the flaming dream 

Which came with islands and bright-scaled water, 

Wheeling a dark and radiant rim 

As near and away from the sun it sped? 

Was it for this I sought or 

Sat in labour? for this that Lucifer 

Sang, the unshadowable light-bearer? 

And of man, of man, what shall be said? 

I would my heart were piteous 

That I might pity him! He lifts his head 

So bravely to the sun, is amorous 

Of beauty, conquest and delight; 

Spends blood upon banners; drums the earth 

With adventurous tramplings; shrills the air 

With the insolent envy of his mirth. 

What have I made of him? What — to requite 

A love more desperate than despair? 

A poor creature smeared with his own dung, 

Who struts a little being young 

And has scarcely sounded his own distress 

Before he has crumbled to rottenness. 

Distinguished on a gilded couch 

He mutters under his dying breath 

Of some old plan of lust or wrath, 

Unaccomplished, beyond his touch. 

Or left beneath a broken rafter 

Crouched on a straw heap, unwarmed, alone, 

A stench of frayed flesh about a bone, 

He counts that best which never was. 

Remembering how the wise drew laughter, 



The Death of God 173 

And dead madmen were accounted wise; 
How lovers had but their blinded eyes 
And Caesar's armies a tune of brass. 

Has the sun no molten core where I may be hid 
Is there no penitential fire to shrive me? 
O, man, man, man, forgive me, 
I wrought, not knowing what I did ! 

I will start up, dragging these bones 

Knee after knee, — if it must be, 

Drag this loose strength, knee after knee, 

And come at last on the shaken thrones 

Of the last golden dynasties 

Of time; startle the suns, and leave their skies 

A smouldering heap of palace stones 

Set in the flaring dusk of a city 

Where none is loud for pain or for pity. 

I will loose the stars from their high stud 

And lash their heavy-hooved stampede 

Till foundering they darken, broken with speed; 

Dabble the moon's face with earth's blood, 

That not one man shall be left at length 

To taunt me with enduring youth. 

I have forgot — I have no strength! 

I am gnawn clean by a ravening tooth. 

The blood in my wrist is so sucked and thinned 

I cannot drag my beard from the wind 

Where its ravelled cords are tossed and lying. 

It is not man but god who is dying! 



174 The Undertaker's Garland 

But how had I known that a god should grow old 
And his bright hair thin to a streaked whiteness, 
His beard fall long and clotted with mould 
Whose heart had been as the dawn for lightness? 
How had I dreamt that at last I should look 
On the stars in their tumult, and find such pain 
In a world I had thought to have made without stain 
That my head would sink in my elbow's crook, 
My throat give sobs in the place of breath, 
My mouth ask easily after death? 

My face is turned toward death, and yet, 

Weak, bewildered and blind, I grope 

Still for the unappeasable hope 

That sleep, not death, shall touch my brain. 

And touch my eyelids, and restore 

Youth and all youth lacked before. 

It may be I shall start up again 

And put on strength like golden greaves 

To the oily shins of a young man set, 

And shake the stars till they fall like leaves 

In an autumn drift along the air; 

Know tumult again and wisdom, and tear 

In the delighted lust of my heart 

The broad beams of the world apart, 

To build again, in another kind, 

The orbs and whirlwinds of my mind. 



Resurrection 

Archer sat in his tent where the air was a shadow 
cast by stained canvas walls. A mist of tobacco, 
blue as evening, drifted from his fingers. His mind, 
restive with idleness, fidgeted with objects, like the 
hands of a sick child: a cross-legged wooden cot 
padded with olive blankets, a painted locker trunk, 
a chair of unplaned wood, a makeshift table holding 
an empty, brazen shell crammed with branches of 
dark fragrant green. 

He crushed out the fire of his cigarette and tossed 
it to the ground. The burnished shell had a 
sombre glint of green where the dark leaves 
shadowed it, the green linden leaves and the dan- 
gling greenish-white clusters, spreading heavily over 
the rounded brass. He plucked at the threaded 
flowers, cloying the air with a sweetish smell, dust- 
ing his hands with sulphur-pale pollen. And the 
smell brought back to him a scene out of his child- 
hood in Maryland: a frail, white boy of ten lying 
between cool sheets on a sunlit bed, begging his 
mother to bring him an armful of linden, green 
leaves and the heavy sweet bloom. He remembered 
the silvery dark trunks of the linden trees which had 
stood in a curved line on the drive to the house, the 

175 



176 The Undertaker's Garland 

shaded road and the white stones at the border. 
How strange it was that this boy of a forgotten 
May twelve years ago, delicate, with inquisitive 
grey eyes and hair blond as linden pollen, should be 
sitting here on this alien field, under Montfaucon, 
a first lieutenant of Infantry in command of a com- 
pany of American soldiers, guarding a half thou- 
sand German prisoners of war. He had thought 
of many things for that boy, but never, for all the 
absurdity of his imaginings, of this plain over which 
the autumn before his own countrymen had fought 
so long and so hard, over which now the spring 
wandered like a vagabond, in a discoloured ragged- 
ness, more desolate than any autumn, 

A week had passed since he had come here, hot 
without rain. Always it seemed, the sky hung over 
this difficult land an arid blue, heavy with heat, 
cloudless. Each morning the German prisoners 
marched out In a long unwieldy column, with a tithe 
of guards, to repair the roads broken by shellfire. 
After them, as soon as the roads were made pass- 
able, came the trucks, to tear open the ground and 
recover the scattered slain, to collect these Isolated 
blanketed dead, box them, and carry them to the 
slopes of Romagne, there to be relnterred, ranked 
again In precise lines, with identical white crosses 
set above them, stained with a name or nameless. 
Twice daily the trucks went out from the town of 
Romagne, negro workmen and white non-coms 
perched on their sides. Twice each day, at noon 



Resurrection 177 

_._ ' 

and late in the afternoon, they passed his camp, 
lumbering heavily, leaving on the air a slow defunc- 
tive odour, the unmistakable, unforgettable odour 
of human decay. 

Idle and unutterably lonely, he almost wished that 
Bleeker were here, Bleeker his second lieutenant 
whom he had come to hate with all the hatred of 
exacerbated nerves. Bleeker would come in pres- 
ently, two days late from his leave in Paris, twist- 
ing a grin under that absurdly long nose of his. 
"Lootnant," he would say, "I know I'm overstayed, 
but I just naturally couldn't get away from the ma- 
demoselles." He would let his musette bag slide 
to the ground by drooping one shoulder. . . . Yet 
it would be a relief of a sort to have Bleeker here 
again. 

A shadow darkened the sun-stained flap of the 
tent, and Archer tossed the fragrant twig on the 
littered table. 

"Come in!" he shouted. 

A soldier drew back the loose flaps and bending 
came into the tent. 

"Lieutenant, sir, there's a Q. M. lieutenant here 
from Romagne says you sent for him to take up 
this grave out'n the stockade." 

The soldier v/as a bulky Georgian who spoke in a 
plaintive drawl. The cheeks puffed under his pale 
eyes were glazed with red; his hair was the rainy 
yellow of hayricks exposed to the wetness of au- 
tumn. Always ill at ease with oflicers, he stooped 



178 The Undertaker's Garland 

uncomfortably under the sloping tent to keep his 
distance. 

"All right, Waters, tell the sergeant I'll be right 
there." 

"Yes sir." The soldier backed out of the tent. 
Archer followed him. 

Outside in the dusty sunlight stood a truck ob- 
structing the roadway, chortling under its long 
heavy body. Beneath the driver's hood a negro 
sprawled, his loose forearms hanging over the 
wheel. Two negro soldiers clothed in blue denim 
leaped from the board of the truck, dragging after 
them picks and spades and coils of wire. They 
moved slowly, grudgingly, like tame crows from 
their food. 

Across the road the tents of the Americans 
marched in motionless precision, a double file of 
ochreous-brown pyramids. To their left, still bor- 
dering the road, was the stockade, a platoon of can- 
vas pyramids, rigidly ranked, enclosed by a high 
fence of weathered posts and the steely glint of 
barbed wire. From each post arms bent inward 
hanging a curtain of wire. The sky was a monot- 
onous haze of dull blue thinning whitely toward the 
high sun. 

Archer entered the stockade. At the entrance 
a palish boy presented arms, turning on him the wist- 
ful eyes of a tired child. Across the stockade fol- 
lowing the interminable strands of rain-bright wire, 
another sentry, with drooping head and sagging 



Resurrection 179 



bayoneted rifle, paced drowzlly. Before the first 
tent, the prisoner sergeant major, a small wiry 
Prussian clad in rusty green, crouched over a wicker 
basket in which he had imprisoned a magpie. At 
Archer's approach, he stiffened tautly and clashed 
his brodequins, his reddish mustaches protruding 
bushily toward his unseeing eyes, the varnished visor 
of his cap making a black crescent of light as he 
moved. Archer saw that a small group of Ameri- 
cans had collected about the grave. The white 
cruciform stake was down; a pine box, newly planed 
and lidless, the length of a man, lay at one side. 
Over the grave with feet wide apart stood an officer 
impatient for the negroes to begin. 

"Hullo, Lieutenant. I got your notice, but this 
is the first chance I've had to get here. We're 
pretty busy up there at Romagne now — runnin' 'em 
in at the rate of three hunderd a day now. All 
right you men, le's go." 

He was an unkempt little man, who, when he 
talked, jerked his head like a bird, and the wax- 
like blue film on his eyes made them like a bird's 
eyes. 

Sullenly the negroes began to dig. The starvel' 
ing sod, rusty with sorrel, gaped under the strokes 
of the pick and spat out pebbles and thick clots of 
clay. The point of the pick overturned clumps of 
grass, the clinging earth threaded with tiny fila- 
ments, white as nerves. The first negro tore the 
sod from the grave and stood back leaning on his 



i8o The Undertaker's Garland 

pickhandle, turning his humid brown eyes and 
stained eyeballs on his companion, who took his 
place on the grave shovelling away the loose peb- 
bles and grass, laying bare a level of naked clay. 

The negroes worked alternately, rhythmically, as 
though to the unheard sound of an obscene savage 
incantation, marking time with the dull thud of the 
pick and the steely scraping of the spade against 
stone. The air, heavy with heat, brought slow 
drops of sweat from the black, dusted foreheads of 
the negroes. Sullenly, half timorously, they deep- 
ened the pit, grunting as they dug. 

The soldiers had at first watched in silence, but 
it was not in their nature to be long awed by any- 
thing, and presently they began to bicker among 
themselves. . . . 

"They could take me out an' shoot me fore I'd 
touch one of them goddam stiffs." 

"The hell you would too. You'd goddam do 
what you're told in this army." Archer recognized 
the voice of the company clerk above the blur of 
words. 

"Well, you c'n let me chase prisoners, corp." 

"Say, Lieutenant," a sergeant drawled, "Yuh 
don't hafta put your bans on 'em do yuh?" 

The officer looked up, and Archer noticed that his 
belt sagged below the waist and that his puttees 
were dull and clogged with clay. 

"Sure. I go through their pockets and every- 
thing — you've got rubber gloves on. At first feel- 



Resurrection i8i 



ing around for their identification tags gets you a 
little, but you soon get so's you don't .mind any of 
it." 

"Yuh don't hafta feel for they tags, do yuh?" 

"You gotta find out if you've got the right man, 
haven't you? Lots of 'em don't have the same 
name on their crosses. But we've got pretty nearly 
all of 'em right now I guess." 

"There ain't nothin' to it." It was the company 
clerk again, a swarthy youth of twenty with black 
eyes set wide apart like a Mongolian's and a nose 
that looked as though it had been broken in child- 
hood. "My father's an undertaker. He's got the 
largest undertakin' establishment in Tipville, Indi- 
ana, and when I was a kid he always wanted me to 
be an undertaker too. So one night he shut me in 
a room with a dead corpse and locked the door and 
kept me there all night so's I wouldn't be afraid no 
more." 

The officer hovered at the edge of the pit, look- 
ing, with his crooked nose and blue-filmed eyes like 
a chicken, like an old cock moulting his dusty and 
bedraggled plumage. He took the pick from one 
of the negroes and dug vigorously for a minute. 

"There, that's more like it. Up this way a little. 
We'll have him out before you know it." 

Maladroitly, stubbornly, the negro placed him- 
self in the shallow pit to dig again. Already this 
cleft in the earth was two feet deep and these men 
were buried, each close to the spot where he had 



1 82 The Undertaker's Garland 

been killed, with only so much earth as would cover 
their putrescence. Archer dreaded the moment 
when the first flesh would be exposed. 

The earth in the hole became cooler and more 
moist. The negroes no longer dared thrust their 
heavy feet into the pit, but leaned from the edge, 
digging slowly and cautiously, pecking at the earth 
with the steel point, scraping the earth away as 
soon as it was loosened. Something damp and 
woolly appeared — a mouldy patch of blanket. The 
ofl^cer took the pick and straddling the pit deepened 
the sides, deftly loosening the remaining earth. An 
equivocal mass, bundled in olive drab wool bulked 
under the sticky clay. Once where the pit had torn 
the rotted blanket, it crumbled and pushed out a 
lichen green grit. 

"Now give me the wire — we'll drag this one out 
by the shoulders." 

Archer turned away, looking out over that hard 
arid plain to which the freshness and green of May 
could bring no relief, nor the sun which elsewhere 
gilded the earth any colour. The uneven ground 
was still, after a winter of rain, littered with the re- 
fuse of battle, knapsacks, pack-carriers, bits of clo- 
thing, shoes, rifles — everything that could be thrown 
away in the hurry and despair of fight. Pitted, bro- 
ken by depressions, the greenish drab soil dragged 
slowly toward the hills at the sky's edge, the once 
contented hills, rounded with thickets, their slopes 
open and fox-red where six months before hollow 



Resurrection 183 



shelters had been scooped out by bayonets. In the 
dizzy blue distance, overtopping the nearer trees, 
shone the heights of the Argonne ragged with gay 
green forests. Over them the sky drew thin 
streamers of hazy white. 

Then he thought: "This is too soft. I'm a 
damn weak-wad if I can't stand looking at it." 
And he walked back, keeping close to the barbed 
wire. 

The soldiers were silent and constrained. The 
negroes crouched sullenly, blue denim figures bent 
at the side of the grave, the sweat curdling the dust 
on their idle black hands. The officer, one foot 
thrust forward, the other crooked under his weight, 
tugged at the wire, which held under its lower loops 
an amorphous mass, caught beneath the armpits. 
Archer saw first a knitted sweater, still intact but 
soppy from the putrefaction beneath it. A clayey 
brown rag was over the face. The taut wire pulled 
again, sharply; something broke near the throat and 
a greenish blue substance, like a fowl's ordure, 
crumbled and fell over the sweater. 

"What the hell ! Give me that pick." 

An arm was embedded in the earth at one side. 
The pick tore into the soft flesh and the aperture 
showed a horrid pink; something was left behind 
in the hard clay. The cadaver began to lift itself 
from the grave. The jointless head fell back, 
thickening the greenish ooze on the neck; the un- 
even arms spread out with each jerk of the wire, 



184 The Undertaker's Garland 

hunching their slimy sleeves. In the space where 
the thighs divide a glinting puddle of muck had 
seeped through the breeches cloth. The legs 
trailed woodenly. 

The cadaver bent backward over the brink of the 
pit and dragged heavily on the ground. 

"There 1 he didn't come so badly at that. A lot 
better'n some of 'em. Now roll him over on the 
blanket." 

The negroes pushed the lifeless man over the sod 
and turned his bulk face up on a clean blanket. The 
officer began palping the dead flesh, searching for 
the metal disc at the neck. 

Disgust clutched at Archer's sides. It was hor- 
rible that this putrescent thing sprawling on the 
ground should have been a few months before a 
boy, fine with youth, warm and strong. He had 
thought of death in battle as something clean and 
swift in its anguish. He had thought it a desirable 
thing that life should go out violently when the 
blood was at its full and the body unspent. He 
had never dreaded death, only manglement and dis- 
ease and the slow dissolution of time. But here 
the body was not utterly dead; it had acquired a 
new life in its very putrefaction. It would go on 
for a long time yet, still younger than the earth in 
which it was hidden, not utterly dead as the dust 
and stones are dead. 

He stared down into the violated pit. The clay 



Resurrection 185 



looked mildewed. Black flies were dangled in the 
air. Hands were fumbling at a green discoloured 
throat. Wires were wheeling in circles of steel 
with tiny prickles of light. His stomach was turn- 
ing with the wires. His eyes were being jabbed by 
the steel barbs. That was why he was so hot. He 
must get away ... to his tent ... it was 
cool there with linden boughs and shadowy and 
sweet. 

Behind him walked the southern sergeant and the 
company clerk. 

"I bet them black bastards thinks about ghosts 
the rest of their life." 

"Well, that's all they're fit for, ain't they? 
Every time they put 'em in to fight they run — right 
over in these woods here — the black sons o' bitches 
ain't fit for gun fodder!" 

He walked back to the road, dragging a shadow 
not cast by the sun. The rumbling of trucks bump- 
ing all day long over the roads, with jangling chains 
and strident gears, trailing the same pervasive odour 
of decay; the blanketed mass he had just seen, with 
its poor upturned face, had broken down within him 
some last wall of resisting flesh. Even the air 
seemed to belong to the dead, and this plain, lying 
as it did midway between the Argonne Hills and 
the Meuse, had, perhaps because he was an Ameri- 
can, become to him the centre of all the rotting des- 
olation which filled the world. 



1 86 The Undertaker's Garland 

' — — t 

On one side of the road, rising behind his own 
tent, was a green slope, topped with thickets, where 
the spring renewed itself remorselessly. And on 
one side was that desolate plain where so many of 
the young had died. He stared at the dessicated 
grass and the dun weeds, the earth pocked and fe- 
ver skinned, made sterile by long pain. His 
squeamishness gave way to pity, pity for himself and 
the others. After all, it would have been better he 
thought, better than this, to have gone in the carn- 
age and assault of war — not to feel the pain of de- 
sire any more, to have the rain run through his body 
as once the blood had run, to have his bones grow 
old under earth, not to be, or to be only as those 
others were, to share the dark, vindictive life of the 
earth, and not to know. 

Some one was talking in his tent; Bleeker must 
have come back. He felt at that moment too utterly 
exposed to bear the level look of Bleeker's indecent 
eyes, and stood, nerveless and cold, outside the tent, 
turning his face toward the blue, brutal glare of 
noon. The negroes returned to the truck, carrying 
picks and spades. The smoke from the mess shack 
thickened darkly against the sun; under their shed 
the cooks moved between the tables and the fires like 
ruddy shadows. After all he was but a man among 
others. Lifting the flap he went into the tent. 

Bleeker was standing in the centre of the tent, his 
cap set jauntily on one side, talking to his orderly. 

"Hello Lootnant! I'm back at last, and boy, I 



Resurrection 187 



want to tell you I've drunk so much champagne in 
the last five days, I'm just naturally breathing bub- 
bles." 

Archer sat down on his cot. The orderly left 
the tent. 

"r was all set to come back night 'fore last, and 
then I thought I'll just go down to the Olympia and 
have one more look at* the mademoselles 'fore I 
came back. Well I was standin' there at the bar 
downstairs, with my foot cocked on the rail. And 
there was one of these tousled blonds sittin' on one 
of those high stools, you know, and I was kiddin' 
her along — she wasn't a bit bad — she didn't have 
no stockings on, just bare legs the whole way, and 
high heel slippers — when in comes my old captain 
out of the Thirty-eighth, with two of the best look- 
in' janes you ever saw. And, boy, I was lost right 
there. I just said, 'Good-bye, Montfaucon!' I 
just couldn't get away till this, morning." 

"It's all right. There wasn't much of anything 
to do." 

"I didn't think there would be, and anyhow this 
was somethin' too good to pass up. 

"You don't have to check out no more with the 
M. P.'s. You know how they used to be in Paris. 
But I was kinda skittish, so I eased down to the sta- 
tion this morning about five o'clock. And the first 
goddam thing I saw when I got there was an M. P. 
I kept one eye slanted on him and started beatin' it 
for the train, when up he comes, and salutes just as 



1 88 The Undertaker's Garland 

nice as you please, and says, 'Can I show the Lieu- 
tenant where to get his ticket?' and 'Where's the 
Lieutenant goin' ?' and 'That's your track, sir.' 
Boy, you could've knocked me down with a feather. 
By the way, I got some good cognac here — five star 
stuff. How 'bout a drink before mess?" 

"Well . . . yes, give me a drink." 

Archer tipped the bottle to his mouth, scraping 
his throat with the raw liquor, warming and com- 
forting his stomach. 

Bleeker slung his musette bag over his shoulder. 
"I think I'll take a look in at my tent, and dump this 
junk before mess," he said, "Take another drink." 

Archer stared for a moment at the young officer 
in front of him with his hard assertive air and the 
voice that seemed to start from too far down in 
his throat. It did not much matter that he had 
come back. 

"Here's yesterday's paper, if you want to see It," 
Bleeker turned and, stooping, went out of the tent. 

Archer picked up the paper, the Paris edition of 
an American journal. Fashionable people were ar- 
riving at fashionable hotels, dining in company, be- 
ing entertained by Napoleonic princesses. The 
Peace Conference had met in the Hall of Mirrors 
in the Palace of Versailles. The German emissary 
had, with characteristic arrogance, remained stand- 
ing while addressing the elderly and elegant Allied 
politicians. There had been a loud outcry. The 
Y. M. C. A. was holding boxing bouts at the Palais 



Resurrection 189 



de Glace, to provide the American soldiers on leave 
with wholesome and moral amusement. 

Staring distractedly at the obscure print, he 
thought of all these impotent fastidious people in 
Paris who, whatever they touched of civilized 
thought and grace, left it inane; he saw that they 
represented a desolation no less complete than the 
abrupt height of Montfaucon, and the hillside under 
it pitted with open graves, empty now as tombs of 
the resurrection. For the rest there was Bleeker, 
with thick reddish skin and hard mouth, standing 
with legs apart loosening a bawdy tale. And he 
hated Bleeker. 

He flung himself on the canvas cot and lay there 
with arms distended, his face rubbing against the 
soiled pillow, his thoughts wheeling confusedly as 
bubbles in an uneven stream. He resented fiercely 
being held here, trapped and held in this charnel 
place, away from the dizzy green and gay abandon 
of cities, the sidewalks fragrant and rustling with 
silk. What wild joy it would be but to stretch his 
legs under the tables in painted cafes, and to drink, 
to drink long. 

Anywhere would be better than here, where the 
water was tainted and the soil dead, and even the 
air came unclean. In Paris whatever was left of 
life ran at the full. The sunlight came to the streets 
strained through a green net of leaves, and the 
night would be filled with lights and amorous voices, 
and women were there who could be bought for a 



190 The Undertaker's Garland 

night and forgotten in the morning. Nothing was 
left but the fine vigour of his body, still young, and 
beginning to stir with heat from the liquor he had 
drunk. He lay on his cot stretched with resentment 
and sultry desires until aflame through his whole 
length with youth and loneliness. 

Bleeker thrust his ruddy face between the flaps of 
the tent. 

"What t' hell's the matter, Lootnant! Mess is 
ready, let's go. I'm as hungry as a hound dog. I 
didn't have nothin' this morning but some bread and 
coffee. And last night was a hard night too, I'm 
tellin' you." 

"All right. I'm not very hungry, but I guess 
there's nothing else to do." Then he said, "I might 
go to Paris myself if I can get a leave through." 

Outside, he stooped for a moment to twist and 
fasten the loose ribbon of his spiral puttee. 
Bleeker glanced across the road. 

"You've had that grave taken up out of the 
stockade, I see," he said, "haven't you?" 

"Yes," said Archer, "They came for him this 
morning." And straightening his body he felt the 
sun warm on his face and hands, and the light of 
May burnished his uncovered hair. 



Epilogue 

Nay, Pluto/ I have dwelt with death too long! 

My spirit chafes; the darkness cannot hold me. 
These lips were shaped to frame a freer song 

Before the strengthless shadows shall enfold me/ 
Apollo, Phoebus/ hear me while I pray: 

Consume the tears, the bitterness, the wrath! 

thou who didst the Pythian serpent slay, 

Slay thou the Furies who make black my path/ 

Well do I know how, terrible and clear. 

Thou cam'st to Krissa with a blaze so white 
The women trembled and cried out for fear 

And veiled their dazzled faces from the sight; 
Well do I know how, speeding with the ships. 

To Sirmio from Lesbos, a fierce ray. 
Thy word was borne to light on Sirmian lips 

The fire that burns the centuries away. 

Apollo, Phcebus/ thou who dwell'st in fire. 

Breathing no life save where thou dost destroy. 

Who leav'st thy lovers wounded with desire. 
Distraught with passion, shuddering with joy; 

1 would be borne by fire, as by a wind, 

I would make dumb all voices with a note 
That stops mens hearts — until mine eyes be blind 
With splendour and till singing burst my throat/- 

igi 



192 The Undertaker's Garland 

Till those who cried in terror and in hate 
Against the flame that brands my brow — at last. 

Finding my flesh so charred^ so Utile great, 

Shall hush to know that here a god has passed! 



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